German Scientists Create Bose-Einstein Condensate Using Photons 61
xt writes "A team of physicists, led by the University of Bonn's Martin Weitz, have managed to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (here's a more detailed explanation) out of photons, previously thought to be impossible. The research was published in the journal Nature (abstract, and the arXiv has the submitted paper as a PDF) and has possible applications on solar energy technology and shortwave lasers, which would be well-suited to the manufacture of computer chips as the process uses lasers to etch logic circuits onto semiconductor materials. Seems like Moore's law is safe again!"
Moore's law is worthless right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Seems like Moore's law is safe again!"
That's great, but if memory and I/O speeds don't keep up, the extra FLOPS are becoming more and more worthless....
The sales pitch is unnecessary (Score:4, Insightful)
The research is a fascinating work about fundamental physics. This is one case where a sales pitch about about possible, only tangentially related applications in computing is quite unnecessary.
Re:Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Better yet, if it really works at room temperature, this method will still be workable once we've squandered the world's supply of helium. (Thanks for a "free market" solution, Congress.)
How much other basic science is going to shortly become impossible - basically prohibitively expensive when we hit the end of "Cheap Helium"?
Makes you wonder what fraction of helium is in the parade floats, and if they attempt to scavenge any of it.
Re:In Between (Score:2, Insightful)
no. you either get dumbed down, or you get equations.
shit's complicated. deal with it or deal with not understanding it.
Wait - the morons have access to Slashdot again? (Score:1, Insightful)