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Science

Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data? 174

Posted by timothy from the honey-use-the-*leather*-thinking-cap dept.
Geoffrey Kidd writes: "There's a very interesting article at EE Times about some research which seems to indicate that an essentially unlimited number of bits can be stored in ONE electron. Hmmm. What if one could encode every .mp3 file on Napster in one electron? :)"
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Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data? More

Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data?

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  • Re:Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Blargh. Familiar with a fella named Georg Cantor? The amount of information encodable *onto* electron states via this method corresponds to the set of the rational numbers (no matter how many stinky ol' electrons you wanna use). The set of all possible electron states corresponds to the set of the real numbers, assuming that the wave's phase is continuously variable.

  • Imagine... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Imagine... a beowulf cluster of these.

    Imagine... how much pr0n you could store on one.

    Imagine... how much pr0n you could store on a beowulf cluster of these.

    Are there Linux drivers available for these yet? I know BSD drivers are available, but Linux is always late with new hardware support.

    I wonder if Britney Spears the lasers and optics physicist thinks of this breakthrough in, uh, reporting by EETimes (well hell, it's not like anything is PROVEN.)

    My bet is with the Britster.

  • REQUEST (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To posters in this story, please stop talking out your asses. It's pretty clear none of you are quantum physics and most of you seem to be operating off of high school level physics.

    So please, if you don't know what you are talking about, don't post as if you do.

  • Only 1 electron? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let's see. One issue is how fast would my electron HDD take to read the last bit? I doubt you can force the electron to skip all 9*10^200000 bits to get the last byte. Another issue is size. I'd be happy to have an 1.5' cube in my box...so long as it's fast enough. You know this tech'll never reach ram chip size. It would be interesting, however, to see if you can bump this electron down a wire or fiber to make a ultra high bandwidth network.

  • Re:Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You know, they have a word that describes that, its called analog.

    Its true, in this increasingly digital world, the fact is that you can store more data accuratly with an analog device (Theoretically). I think people are too quick today to dismiss anything analog as obsolete and out dated. Perhaps digital technology has surpassed analog for now, but it may not always be so.

    I am not the only one who thinks there is too much emphasis on the digital. There was a recent article in a Discover on a man building analog robots. (Discover, Sept 2000 Vol 21, No. 9, Pg 86: Biobots) I don't know if it is also covered on the website, www.Discover.com [discover.com]. Analog devices use waveforms instead of descrete steps. This means that there can be numbers or states described that are not rational. (PI anyone?)

    Sorry, my soapbox
  • changing its constituent atoms' phase could mimic the wave-function phase of a metal, thereby imbuing plastic with the strength of steel.

    Hey! Is this the guy Scotty gave the recipe to transparent aluminum to?

  • In mathematics (or at least the kind I know of), 'countable' is a technical term meaning that the set can be placed into one-to-one correspondence with either the whole set of natural numbers, or with a finite subset of them (the former is said to be 'countably infinite', the latter 'finite'). The term 'uncountable' referes to the case when there are 'too many' of something to give each one a unique positive whole number (for example, the real numbers -- or any power set of an infinite set).
    John
  • You mean by 'cardinals' the set of natural numbers? There is no set of cardinals, in the case where you allow infinite cardinals (where by 'cardinal' I mean one of the 'cardinals', which is the proper-class of transitive sets well-ordered by inclusion).

    'Trasitive' in this sense basically means that X is transitive if and only if for every subset Y of X, Y is also a member of X. 'Well-ordered by' means that every subset has a smallest element with respect to that ordering.
    John
  • If anyone has ever read the Broken God series by Zindel, one thing he mentions in the final book is the necessity for a universe worth of storage to describe/simulate the universe perfectly.

    This whole infinite storage thing is fairly wild, but I'm trying to get a grasp on the infinities here. Does this mean that we could then encode a description of the contents of the entire universe in one infintesimally small member of it??
  • This shit blows my mind.

    Yeah, it blew my mind, too. In fact, it was so mind-blowing I failed the course the first time through, largely due to my lack of understanding of that energy-well stuff. Truth be told, I still don't know what the hell an energy well is.

    Of course, all that relativity stuff came easy after having read so many sci-fi books about space travel (particularly Speaker for the Dead). I breezed through that stuff. ;)
  • Infinity isn't a number.

  • Precision (Score:1)

    by bs ( 5114 )
    Of course one electron can hold an infinite amount of data. So can one bit, for that matter. All you lose is precision.
  • The theory is very interesting but how do you get the data in and out of an electron?
  • I can see the slashdot headline of 2024: Student gets electron confiscated for disributing illegal .mp9's over the hyperverse.
  • Each atom can theoretically contain as many bits as you want, but reading/encoding/searching would become impractical at some point if you set up several to represent blocks/sectors on a HD you might be able to have a usable indexing scheme to store/retrieve data.
    [
    Disclaimer: IANAQP(Quantum Physicist), so I may be way off base here because of the whole every state at once reading the whole thing could be instantaneuos]
  • I thought that an electron was pretty stable. I thought that you needed chaos to store data. Is instability a result of chaos? I don't want my electrons crashing just when I need the data.
  • The question is: Is ist countable? If you have 2 infinite countable sets P and Q, then the union of P and Q is an infinite Set as well. Take a look at the hilbert-hotel. We have a hotel with infinite but countable number of rooms, which are all ocupied and an infinite but countable number of guests have just arrived. Say all guests: if there old room-number is n they have to move to room 2*n and to every new guest there room-number is guest-number*2+1.
  • So what about pi or sqrt(2)? We have any finite piece of Information in there, the trick is to find the location and length. So RIAA should ask the court to forbid things like pi.

  • Yes, an eigenstate is the same thing as an eigenvector belonging to a certain eigenvalue.

    The difference is that you need to choose a basis for you state space to talk about matrices and vectors, while the notion of state is more abstract and doesn't refer to a particular basis.

  • This is simply wrong, though a very common misconception by people who read about (but don't necessarily understand) quantum physics.

    "[...] I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," — Richard Feynman.


    Cheers,

  • Lov Grover, who proposed the theory, has a website [bell-labs.com] with links to his publicatiions.

    I couldn't figure out from the abstracts which paper EE Times was referring to.

  • If this advanced race would abandon all technology once the latest has come out, then I would not consider them more advanced then the fools on our planet.

    Imagine an race with a more advanced understanding of physics than us, which enables them to make something which works like a "FTL radio" - us sometime in the 21st century, maybe? If they practise SETI as we know it and don't mind being detected, they'll certainly want to ping the universe with their new signal in the hope of a reply from someone who can receive it. But they might not consider it worthwhile to send electromagnetic-spectrum messages as well, and not just because of disinterest in backward technology or communication with backward civilizations. For example, suppose that we humans (or trans [transhumanist.org]/posthumans [transhumanist.org]) do develop "FTL radio" before 2101. That would mean that we would have gone from the invention of radio communications to its surpassment in less than 230 years (Marconi was born in 1874, and received his first patent on radio communications in 1896) - a blink in the history of humanity, never mind the universe. That's a tiny window to attempt to hit with a communication system which takes many thousands of years to cover the distance between stars. If we came to the conclusion that other civilizations were overwhelmingly likely to make the same transition in roughly the same length of time (and one could happily give or take at least one order of magnitude), then why bother with radio SETI? The inhabitants of an alien planet with a similar history might well come to the same conclusion. A different alien planet might be interested only in the kind of meaningful communication which would be made possible by a sufficiently fast system. Or perhaps no-one on the planet would even have thought of the possibility that anyone out there was sending or listening for ET radio waves - possibly because that planet never stopped off at radio on its way to "post-radio".

    You seem to forget that the smart 'SETI types' aren't searching for the interstellar phone calls of an alien race, they are looking for markers or buoys or sentinels.

    Speaking, I admit, as someone who has no expert knowledge of SETI or electromagnetic spectrum communications, this would surprise me a bit.

    Consider our own chances of being detected. We've sent out our own deliberate markers, but we've put out a much larger number of transmissions that were never intended for communication with aliens, and a much greater variety of them, too. It seems a reasonable assumption that any one of our deliberate communication signals would be much easier to find and recognise than any one of the unintentional ones. But if you weighed all our intentional signals against all our unintentional ones, could you really say that if an alien did spot one of our signals, it would probably be an intentional one? Let alone that they would be so much more likely to spot an intentional signal that it wouldn't even be worth keeping an eye out for unintentional ones?

    Our "SETI types" obviously shouldn't be looking for clones of 20th century Earth, but it seems likely enough that a detectable inhabited planet with might be in a similar position to Earth in this respect (or in the more extreme position of not making any deliberate transmissions at all) that looking only for deliberate transmisions would be unwise.

  • Other posters have picked up on the fact that the quantum state of the electron will have to be refreshed to prevent decay and thus data loss. I believe that there will be another fundimental problem with this approach. They are using super-position of wave functions to store the data in the electron, but whenever the data is read back, the wave function will collapse and the data will be lost. For this reason this will probably never be practical for large amounts of static data storage, but has more promise as a ram-type technology.
  • I seem to read from my physics textbooks that thermodynamics define the minimum energy required to record a single bit of information; at 3.2 degrees Kelvin, you would need 4.4E-16 ergs to set or clear a bit. So doesn't it mean whichever way you go, storing an infinite amount of information requires an infinite amount of energy?
  • Really? Please just post a link, or more info.
  • The mathematics of infinities (both countable and uncountable) is odd, but the short answer is "the same amount". Think of it this way - there are the same number of odd integers as there are integers as a whole (ha! bad pun!), because every integer (odd or even) can be mapped onto an odd integer by multiplying it by two and adding one. So 1 -> 3, 2->5, 3->7 etc, and we have a one-to-one correspondence between integers and odd integers, so there are the same amount of each.

    Of course, the article doesn;t specify the type of infinity involved...

  • For now it is, but the FCC is petitioning God to modify quantium mechanics to implement watermarking and copy protection.
  • FUCKING read FUCKING the FUCKING fucking FUCKING article
  • Whohoo! Forgot to hit "anonymous" before posting -that- bit of flamebait :)
  • The weird part is that if you take an electron and put it in an infinite energy well, the electron is bounded to exist in the well. It gets funky in that there is a small probability that it will exist outside the well also!

    Not true. This is the "infinite square well" setup. If the potential outside the area you're considering is truly infinite (i.e., 0 between points A and B, and infinite everywhere else), the electron is guaranteed to be between points A and B. If the potential is really high, but not infinite, then there is a non-zero probability that the electron will exist outside the well. I believe that the probability goes something like exp[-potential], but it's been a few months since I had any quantum (goddam Ph 2B).

    There are some other interesting things that go on with these particular boundary conditions (something with sines and cosines), but I forget. Check out an intro Quantum book [amazon.com] for some more info.

    -Chris

  • The good news is that you can put all of Napster on a single electron.

    The bad news is that you need 12 tons worth of equipment to play the music.
  • I had rather thought that seti relied on the fact that there were alot of stars, at differnt distances. So it's not like we're scanning for anybody alive now in the whole universe, but rather that the universe is split into various sets (determined by distance from us). The assumption being that each set is big enough to contain at least a few of the presumed civilsations alive at that time. The older sets are obviously bigger, but also fainter.
  • Then /. would be an absolute jungle of lame posts. Think about it. There are close to (if not more than) 100,000 /. users out there. With an average of only 1% trying to get FP on one article, per day, on an average of 10 articles per day, that would bring the total number of FPers per article to approx. 100. Too many for my liking!

    Just think, you may have created a monster! :-)

  • Did you read the article?

    Quantum phase storage manipulates the phase of the electron field NOT the spin of the electron.

    "Our wave packets enable us to engineer atoms by adjusting the amounts and quantum phases of an atom's electrons"

  • I can't fathom the implications of this in a regular state of mind....sheeesh!
  • The underlying principle behind this has actually been discussed for quite awhile; this is the first time I have seen anyone propose a practical use for it.

    I wish I could remember the article where I originally read this, but it is called the holographic theory of quantum physics, so named because something about the photographic qualities of holograms allows them to be non-local, i.e. one small element of a hologram can be developed into the entire image. Apparently this has a quantum physics analogue...electrons are also non-local, and therefore one electron could theoretically contain all the information of the universe. (Can you tell I'm not a physicist? :>). This aspect of quantum physics is, I believe, called the theory of non-locality.

    So if this is true, the amount of information stored wouldn't really be infinite, just very large...unless you consider the universe itself to be infinitely large.
  • Quote:
    * Exact positioning of an electron is forbidden by the Uncertainty Principle, anyway As above - this is irrelevant. It is the uncertainty principle that _gives_ us the wavelength of the electron, among other things. The electron orbits are _definitely_ large enough for this to be a non-issue (as they're more than a wavelength in size).

    Isn't the resolution that you can define between two different states also equal to the uncertainty?

    For instance if the incertainty was 5, yes I could have any of the states from 1-100, (and all the fractions inbetween) however, I couldn't tell the difference between state 4 and state 6 because I can only say that this state is state 4+-5, and the other is state 6 +-5.
    Doesn't violating this break the uncertainty barrier? (I can't measure 5mV on my voltmeter, so instead I'll bump everything up to 5V and then it will tell me the difference between 5V and 5.005V)
    I might be wrong, but I just got done with a 3rd year physics class and this was my understanding.
  • While it's theoretically possible to encode many bits into an electron, there are real limits. If for example, you actually could encode the entire DeCSS source into a single electron, (actually a single atom), it would take a very long time to read it back out.

    How long? - Let's assume that you can read a single bit out of this electron in one picosecond. (10^-12 seconds). Each additional bit would double the read time (because of Heisenberg, and friends). My copy of DeCSS weighs in at 3145 bytes after being compressed with PKzip 2.50. This is 25160 bits. So, 10^-12 * 2^25160 ==> 8.2*10^7561 Seconds, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the lifespan of the universe. Of course, cutting things down to size by doing parallel processing would help. The most bits that could be read in 1 second would be 39.9, assuming no noise, etc. The practical limits of Analog/Digital conversion technology are past 24 bits of resolution, but not much more, so don't count on getting DeCSS into less than 1049 atoms any time soon. ;-)

    --Mike--

    • If they evolved with the ability to observe the "true quantum-wave reality" of our existence, then they might not be aware of the "radio waves" that appear as artifacts of some more fundamental medium.

    Maybe you're talking about some kind of evolution that I can't even imagine (and I would think you couldn't either, but perhaps I'm wrong). But, such an alien would presumably be aware of spatial dimensions. Radio waves would appear to them to be extensions of a wave phenomenom into many spatial dimensions.

    Again, maybe these aliens would be just as aware of things on a very small spatial scale as large and not think much of such a thing, but one would think that they wouldn't ignore large wave patterns that seem to be generated by intelligence extending out across many thousands of light-years of space.

    I would think that such aliens would be able to more immediately grasp the significance of radio waves (and all electomagentic spectrum phenomenon) than we are and would have uses for them (bouncing them off of other wave phenomenon, art, who knows). As I said, maybe I just don't have the imagination necessary to posit your aliens.


    -Jordan Henderson

  • Oh! (Score:1)

    by mattr ( 78516 )
    Thank you very much for your kind words. I often wonder (like perhaps many people do) about potential connections between the quantum reality of physicists and our networked world. Maybe no connection at all and all we are seeing are the natural results of network effects and wishful pattern matching, when you seem to get unexpected synergies coming at you.

    One question I have is whether the "waveform collapse" of entangled systems is complete even for very weak environmental interactions like gas molecules bouncing off an object. Come to think of it, if I had a thermal random number generator in my laptop, would its chips be entangled to any degree each time a new number was generated?

    If anyone knows of an online forum for this kind of Q&A or similar articles, would appreciate information.. thanks again.
  • Yes, this is what I meant. There have been a number of announcements of multi-qubit computers being made out of groups of ions, individual atoms, or what have you. The SciAm article I referred to was about this, the author was a scientist in the field and had invented a search algorithm which used superimposed states in the quantum computer. It apparently was proven to be the fastest such search algorithm possible.

    But this and other articles have noted that there is a limit to the number of quantum bits (qubits) that can be assembled in a reasonably stable fasion. I do not know why, but I think we are up to between 4 and 7 qubits (IBM built something recently I think /. noted), with the limit being around 14 or so. Maybe this limitation has nothing to do with qubits made out of one atom-wide wire or dots in a semiconductor chip. I was just thinking that if you could take one electron (or an atom, or a group of a bazillion atoms) and impose a bit pattern of arbitrary length on this single piece of matter, then there would be no qubit limitation.

    I'll look on the net some more (more than I usually do), thanks.

    The suggestion of modifying plastic to have metal characteristics by modulating these Coulomb potentials their laser can access is very wild. I remember a science fiction story (Doc E.E.Smith's lensman series, or possible A.E. Van Vogt.. or the Rama series?) in which the skin of a space battleship was strengthed to withstand weapons that would destroy ordinary metal in an instant, by using "molecular force generators"!! Sound familiar? I suppose if you just shined your laser on a corner of the piece of metal, the entire metal structure might be strengthened.. neat!
  • If you are a physicist then I would honestly like to know why my above post is so terrible. Seems to extrapolate in brave asses hangin' off the cliff Slasdot style. Since I've only been able to read Scientific American and Nature articles about this, and only had up to organic chemistry in college I certainly don't have a background in the field but do have a thirst for knowledge. Please respond with valid information, anonymous coward or not.
  • Ummm... actually, i=sqrt(-1) is a perfectly valid value in the universe.
    It's just that it took a long time for people to discover it hiding in the framework of mathematics. It made people nervous as well hence the original term "imaginary number". The ancient Greeks discovered the irrational numbers and had to hide them from the general populace for fear of mass panic.
    The fact that it is required for QM (and QED among other things) is what forced people to recognize the reality of "imaginary" numbers.
    ---CONFLICT!!---
  • That particular example would do more than put a strain on the process. "Reinserting the waves" would be adding a driving force to the system. Given that the need for this is the damping force of the tub walls, we would have a damped driven system. Since the driving force would be continually increasing eventually it will turn chaotic.
    ---CONFLICT!!---
  • ... would make the RIAA sue God's Creation and outlaw electrons. It's that simple.

    It's a good thing you cannot patent elect... um. Wait.
    I didn't say this. Don't want any ideas emerging here...

  • Umm ... correction: the union of two infinite sets is always infinite, regardless of whether or not they are countable.
    • Infinity isn't a recognised value in the Universe.
    • Whilst those orbits may be "theoretically" valid, any orbit which does NOT coincide with a valid point in space (which is also quantized, and not necessarily with the same step size), is an invalid orbit and cannot be entered.
    • Any orbit which is excluded due to any other phenomina (eg: Casimir Effect) also cannot be entered.
    • Of the remaining orbits, any orbit which would cause the electron to shift which nucleus or other particle it is orbiting, will negate that orbit and replace it with the corresponding new orbit around the new center point.
    • Exact positioning of an electron is forbidden by the Uncertainty Principle, anyway, which would prohibit the knowledge of the exact position and energy of the electron.
  • Each electron could hold the same set of infinite data but in a different order.
  • Hello Pete,

    While I bask in the warm glow of your pity for me, let me point out what is ''obvious'' to us, now, was not even known 200 years ago and the bulk of it will probably be ludicrously outmoded 200 years hence. And that's us, the same race, in pretty much the same environment just separated by 200 of your Earth years.

    If there are *aliens* out there with advanced technology, there is no reason for it to even be *possible* for a human to understand or even recognize it as a system; after all, our brains are of a finite size. In the same way that a dog will never truly appreciate music (howling tunelessly along because of a certain frequency content aside), surely more advanced races than us would beat us out with no more difficulty than we lock doors in front of our pets.

    Anyway, the point was that the mere fact that we are still stumbling over these epoch-making concepts tells me - maybe you more advanced mutants don't need telling - that we may well still be too pathetic to imagine what medium would be the lingua franca for interstellar beacons &c used by hypothetical superadvanced civilizations.
  • > We'll have Heisenberg compensators to take care of that.

    Life imitates Trek. IBM has invented just such a thing.
  • Ok, I'll take the bait.

    * Infinity isn't a recognised value in the Universe.

    Prove it. All I see so far is hand-waving.
    It's easy to show that it's _impractical_ to build a device with an infinite number of states, but it's certainly _possible_ (if you have an infinite amount of room).

    * Whilst those orbits may be "theoretically" valid, any orbit which does NOT coincide with a valid point in space (which is also quantized, and not necessarily with the same step size), is an invalid orbit and cannot be entered.

    Check that high-school physics textbook. Orbital radius goes up as the square of the energy level - even at it's smallest level, it's much too large to be affected by the granularity of space.

    * Any orbit which is excluded due to any other phenomina (eg: Casimir Effect) also cannot be entered.

    Other forms of noise will limit practicality long before the Casimir effect does. Regardless, the casimir effect wouldn't make any of the orbits impossible. If you had enough room for the electron shell to exist, the casimir effect would be irrelevent for orbits in that shell.

    The Casimir effect also wouldn't have much of an effect period; it just affects the number and wavelength of virtual photons present in a region of space. So what?

    * Of the remaining orbits, any orbit which would cause the electron to shift which nucleus or other particle it is orbiting, will negate that orbit and replace it with the corresponding new orbit around the new center point.

    So suspend a single atom in a magnetic trap in vacuum, as the experiment in the article almost certainly did.
    This (requirement that nothing else be nearby) also still doesn't affect whether the orbit is _possible_. As I said before, measurement concerns are already known to limit how many states you can use with practical equipment.

    * Exact positioning of an electron is forbidden by the Uncertainty Principle, anyway

    As above - this is irrelevant. It is the uncertainty principle that _gives_ us the wavelength of the electron, among other things. The electron orbits are _definitely_ large enough for this to be a non-issue (as they're more than a wavelength in size).

    Summary: I'm afraid that your objections are based on a variety of assumptions that turn out not to hold, both about the nature of the experiment described in the article and about my own arguments. If you are genuinely interested in this topic, I'd strongly suggest picking up a first-year physics textbook and browsing the sections on quantum mechanics and atomic structure. It will be well worth it.
  • Isn't the resolution that you can define between two different states also equal to the uncertainty?

    For instance if the incertainty was 5, yes I could have any of the states from 1-100, (and all the fractions inbetween) however, I couldn't tell the difference between state 4 and state 6 because I can only say that this state is state 4+-5, and the other is state 6 +-5.

    Doesn't violating this break the uncertainty barrier? (I can't measure 5mV on my voltmeter, so instead I'll bump everything up to 5V and then it will tell me the difference between 5V and 5.005V)

    I might be wrong, but I just got done with a 3rd year physics class and this was my understanding.

    The answer is "it depends".

    You can measure a particle's energy with arbitrary precision, but get progressively worse resolution on its position as you do so (due to position/momentum uncertainty).

    In this case, the escape hole is the fact that the electron orbits get very large at higher energy levels. The resulting position uncertainty isn't enough to make distinguishing the states impossible, even with the fineness of the energy measurements needed.

    As for your measuring apparatus, what winds up happening (if I understand correctly) is that the time required to determine the electron's energy level increases. Time to distinguish between two states is (I think) some proportionality constant times the oscillation period of the photon that would be emitted or absorbed by the electron when changing from one state to the other. For finely spaced states, this is significant.
  • Before you object - yes, the number of states between the ground state and ionization threshold is infinite, even with quantum mechanics. Check a high school physics or chemistry textbook, or work it out yourself from the formulae in the textboks. Valid orbits have a circumference that is an integer number of electron wavelengths (from one to infinity).
  • Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that certain pairs of properties can only be measured to a finite degree of precision. There are only a few such paired properties: position/momentum and time/energy are the only ones mentioned in my Physics text [Physics for Scientists and Engineers Volume 2, 3rd Ed., 1991 Paul A. Tipler, Worth Publishers, page 1180]. Electron phase is not one of the effected properties, so Heisenberg doesn't seem to be a limit here. Shannon, on the other hand, may have something to say in the matter.

  • Have you rad the article? In what I understood of the article, it says that with a lazer the scientist induces a wave into the elctron, and then it's possible to read the wave stored in the atom.

    The infinity of bits encoded would be stored in the time dimension, witch is infinity as long as I know. Then is want to store more data you just have to wait more to store it. It is something like a endless backup tape.

    Things I don't know is do we have to wait for a specific point in time to start reading? Is there a limitation in the wave length, probably yes, for the reason above (it's a quantic value)? Does it run on linux?

    --
    "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
  • How is the data stored in the electron ever read or modified? Last I checked, there's a prevalent little theory known as the Heisenburg Uncertainty Priciple states that observing an electron inherently implies changing its position/state. Since this theory is generally accepted by just about every scientist I've ever met, how is it that we're supposed to read data without modifying it in a possibly unpredictable way here? It's the same situation with transporters in Star Trek - they simply can't exist as long as this principle holds true.

  • "Where'd my hard drive go? It was here a second ago!"

  • cool (Score:2)

    by BradyB ( 52090 )
    It seems that this is a step in the right direction for quantum computer, but how in the world would something allocate and infinite number of registers of memory. Would this "exciting" of the atom to which the electron belongs in someway eventually change the atom? How can it be possible that an infinite amount of data can be placed in one electron without it altering the spin or changing the atom in some adverse way. Anyway cool idea. How'd we get here anyway?
  • "Yeah, well, I got a new electron the other day, with the latest in quantum interfaces, so now I've got around 500 terrs of storage, more than enough to store my century of MP3s."
    ---
  • Yes, but they aren't storing analog information.
    ---
  • Altering the phase of the electron in an atom equals exciting the electron. And from what I remember from school physics, excited electrons tend to "fall back" into place (revert to it's previous waveform) after some time, sending out the extra energy as light.

    Energy levels in electrons can be raised to stable values. Only when you knock them off the shelf do the return to a lower energy level and release a photon with energy equal to the difference betweent the prior and new state.

  • Theoretically it's true, but is there a practical way of measuring the spin of an electron that finely? Wouldn't Heisenburg make it so that the electron would be both blank and fully formatted until you bothered to read it? Or would the process of reading the data actually alter the data on this disk?

    That and I think an electron would be a bit too small for storage purposes... I have enough problems losing CD-Rs half the time... no less a storage media where I could only know the angular momentum or the location, but not both...
  • This is all well and fun, except that the second you get almost any bit of matter near it your data is lost. Now if you could apply this to some particle that doesn't interact as promiscuously as the electron (neutrino?). But then, the less it interacts with, the harder it is to read it, much less capture and adjust its properties.

  • yet ram prices are still going up??

    how many electrons are there in ram? geez

  • "Now we want to find out how long information can be stored," he said.

    Probably about 10 nanoseconds. Which is about as long as it takes for anything I put on a floppy to be lost.
  • yeah - when we finally meet an alien and we ask why he didn't send us messages he'll say "Jeez, we've been hurling meteorites at you for years."

    -Pete

  • How do you pronounce that word? "eigenstates"

    Like "Egon Spengler" of the Ghostbusters, but with an "I"---and say the "on" as "en"---then add states.

    As far as what they are, I couldn't say, but it probably has something to do with the eigenvalues [wolfram.com] of a matrix describing the electron?

    --8<--

  • maybe the more data you store the longer the latency to retrieve that data ?

    This kind of makes sense since more data would be stored by a longer signal...

    --8<--

  • That's one of the things I find so exciting. You could have a HUGE amount of redundancy built in. Why not store the same information on a bunch of electrons. Now if we can only get those electrons to change the state of other time and space separated electrons we would be in business! Instant communication and all that. I wonder how far we are from controlling THAT property? :)

    --8<--
  • It had all my homework and...


  • add compression and you can get past infinity.
  • Dialup just got a lot faster...

    --

  • "There are an infinite number of individually addressable states -- the Coulomb potentials -- where quantum bits can be stored," said Bucksbaum.
    So does this mean that each electron out there is like Borel's [att.com] infinite monkeys [rfc-editor.org], and they all contain the complete works of Shakespeare? Or even more importantly, the un-"encrytped" digital signal of every movie ever made? If the MPAA figures this out, and gets a judge to order a halt on distribution of electrons, there sure will be a lot of hungry people in this country!
  • If you can theoretically store infinite data, would you have to wait an inifinite amount of time to find a particular piece of datum?

    Only if you filled the whole address space with your data. If you use a finite portion of the space, you ought (one would think) to be able to find your data in a finite amount of time. And one would suppose that it would take you an infinite amount of time to write an infinite amount of data, so the seek time would be the least of your problems in that case. Or so it seems to my poorly educated mind at first blush.

    On the other hand, if there are an infinite number of bits available, one would suppose the bits are in a random state before we begin to write to them. Perhaps this means that every .mp3 file on napster is already there, and you just have to find them. So perhaps the seek time is a big deal after all.

    Now I just have to sit back and wait for the information theory people to set me straight... ;-)

  • Transporters use Heisenburg compensators, along with infinity quantum-capacitating double optiplexed deferring plothole stabilizers, so they don't suffer from that problem!
  • Infinity 'squared' is just infinity again - the same infinity. Infinity 'factorial' (the power set = the set of all subsets) on the other hand is a different infinity.

    For those who like such things: For any set, take any function which maps it into it's power set (transforms each element of the set into a subset of the set). For this function, consider the set of all points which are not within the set which they map to. This set might be empty, but it is defined for the function. Whatever the subset, no point can be mapped to it by the function in question (think about it!). So there is an element of the power set which is not mapped to by the function. No matter what the function is. No matter what the set is.

  • perhaps its just a conspiracy, just one electron holds the data, and we pay the charge for "extra" memory. ;)
  • What if one could encode every .mp3 file on Napster in one electron?

    Well, I guess you would then have the biggest collection of badly encoded and half finished mp3's in the world.

    --

  • Electrons are funny shit. Between heisenburg's uncertainty principle and the fact that the integral of the wavefuntion for an electron from -infinity to +infinity =1.

    Basically, for those of you who haven't had any quantum mechanics courses:

    The uncertainty principle says dXdP>=h. Where dX=delta X (position), and dP=delta P (momentum). h is Plancks constant (on the order of 10^-34). It basically says we can never know both the exact position and momentum of an electron. The more closely we measure one, the more error on the other.

    As for the integral of the wavefunction, the probability of the electron existing from -infinity to +infinity will always be 1 (obviously). The weird part is that if you take an electron and put it in an infinite energy well, the electron is bounded to exist in the well. It gets funky in that there is a small probability that it will exist outside the well also!

    This shit blows my mind.

  • not the particle or "point". You're exactly right that the quantum world is so different than the macro world that most of the mental energies spent on the subject are wasted in translating abstract concepts between the two worlds. We humans have a lot to learn.
  • it seems very interesting to store infinite data into one single electron, but will it be possible to transfer this data to another electron?
  • The fact that an observable (e.g. position) is quantized does not in itself mean it cannot have an infinite number of states. It's like the difference between integers and real numbers. Real numbers are continuous, whereas integers take discrete values (quantized if you like), however both has an infinite range of values (give me an integer, and I can alway add one to it.)

  • Re:Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data? (Score:3)

    by warmcat ( 3545 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @11:21PM (#775071)
    Hello Lars -

    the union of two infinite sets is always infinite

    That certainly sounds reasonable; however, as I understood the article, they are encoding their ''infinite data'' in the precise value assigned to what I think is called a scalar quantity (the phase, I assume, perhaps stupidly, expressed as an angle). So the first bit says whether it starts as 0 degrees or 180 degrees, the second bit adds 90 degrees if it is set, the third 45 degrees if set, and so on.

    So this ''infinite'' data set boils down to a single infinitely precise number, say, 36.789...etc degrees. So that was one electron, perhaps full of an infinite number of Metallica albums. Now if we cp that electron to another one to give to a friend, but we added a Lene Marlin track at the beginning of it (having better taste than our friend), clearly it will end up with a different phase angle, even though it has an infinitude of contents (in different order). The phase angle will even be radically different if the first few bits of the added data are quite different.

    Well, that is why I think your objection is wrong in this case:

    • because the ordering of the data is used to encode the result
    • because it is the extent of the data that is infinite, not the contents in a superposition sense.

    -Andy

  • Re:Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data? (Score:3)

    by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @07:02AM (#775072) Homepage
    How do you pronounce that word? "eigenstates"

    Like "Commander Taco" of Slashdot, but with an "I"--and say the "ommander Taco" as "gen"--then add states.

    They're like a standing wave: they describe why electrons fall into particular orbits. You can read about it at [The Rotten Foundations of 20th Century Physics] [aol.com].

    --

  • Um, this is *BASED* on quantum mechanics. (Score:3)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @06:04AM (#775073)
    This means that what "should" be inifinite, given a purely Newtonian view of the world, will always become finite in a Quantum Mechanical view of the world.

    Um, this technique is _based_ on quantum mechanics. This is clearly described in the article.

    An electron orbiting an atom can be at any of an infinite number of energy levels between the ground state and the ionization threshold. The researchers have found a clever way to arbitrarily set the probability of the electron being in each of these states, simultaneously - which gives them as many bits of data as they have states. They also have a clever way of reading back out all of this state probability information.

    Limits to this are based on the time it takes the states to decay back to the ground state (which affects the lifetime of the data) and the time it takes to perform the read operation (which isn't stated, but which almost certainly lengthens for the closely-spaced energy states near the ionization energy).

    No limits from newtonian/quantum mechanics, just ordinary engineering tradeoffs.

  • Excited electrons (Score:3)

    by redhog ( 15207 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @02:55AM (#775074) Homepage
    Altering the phase of the electron in an atom equals exciting the electron. And from what I remember from school physics, excited electrons tend to "fall back" into place (revert to it's previous waveform) after some time, sending out the extra energy as light.

    This means that a memory made up of electrons is a dynamic RAM, and must be re-updated all the time.

    Since altering the wave == exciting electrons, it takes energy. And the more improbable states you want (higher shells in the old atom-model), the more energy you have to inject. Thus, the number of states are not infinite, but restricted by the amount of energy available/feasable.

    If I remember correctly, someone posted an article some weaks ago, calculating the theoretical limits of a computer of a certain weight and size. From what I can see, this aproach to storing information does not break this theoretical limit at all...

  • Re:Breaking News... (Score:3)

    by alienmole ( 15522 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @01:35PM (#775075)
    In related news, a federal ban on MP3-encoded electrons has been issued by Judge Lewis "I'll Censor Anything" Kaplan, of DeCSS trial fame.

    In an attempt to enforce this ruling, the FBI is developing a so-called "killer" electron known as "Quantumvore". Pending regulatory approval, the FBI plans to release large numbers of Quantumvores into the Internet infrastructure, in order to seek out and destroy banned electrons. Quantumvore is actually a type of positively-charged anti-electron known as a positron, which upon coming into contact with an MP3-encoded electron will annihilate with a release of energy determined by Einstein's famous formula, E=mc^2.

    A number of physicists have expressed serious concern that the sheer quantity of MP3-encoded electrons now thought to be in circulation could mean that the release of Quantumvore will result in large explosions occurring within milliseconds of each other in countless locations throughout the world. Simulations indicate that such explosions are likely to be centered on college dormitories, which in some cases may have sufficient concentrations of MP3-electrons to trigger chain reactions, which collectively would be capable of utterly destroying the Earth.

    An RIAA spokesperson responded to these concerns by saying "Without strong intellectual property protection, and the ability for monopoly content brokers to maximize revenue, the Earth may as well not exist anyway."

    Stay tuned for further developments in this breaking story...

  • I got a question, hope somebody can poke holes in it. Say you have an unlimited number of states, and we ignore problems with how much energy or time you might need to get to that resolution.

    Suppose you encode everything about a computer, its RAM contents and operating rules into a piece of data, basically a long number. Say you are doing something like dumping the VMWare PC emulator program and its memory buffers into this piece of data, along with your own program and also a bunch of other locations which are telltale bits that would only be set to true if certain instructions (your program) are executed in a certain order, so you can in a sense freeze a sequence of calculations, an overall machine state.

    So in the end the last telltale will finally be set only if the results of the calculation which suposedly had been executed by this hypothetical (virtual) computer, was provably the answer you seek, i.e. the factors of a big prime number which could be multiplied together to show they are the right answer. A self-referential logic filter.

    My conjecture (gleefully made without more knowledge of quantum physics than is available in lay publications..) is this. Could you use this huge number as a filter or reference beam to collapse the waveform of your recording medium, and read out the state of the virtual computer with the output of your program, in a picosecond?
    It would seem that any Turing machine from a Cray to a ribosome (an rna tape device), could be simulated in this way, though smaller memory footprint/instruction set machines would be easier since they could be represented with less eigenstates. I wonder how many states would be the least amount necessary to simulate something useful.. if a full hardware abstraction is not needed and you can get away with just a language definition and virtual machine (yes like Java VM).

    Would this mean you could run any program that can fit into the virtual machine in picosecond time? And if so, could you not in fact build a computer of any arbitrary capabilities by simply writing a pseudocode definition of how it ought to work? Final scary question.. The interior of a cell is a controlled environment and until the cell is queried by some process it is conceivable that some ribosomes could exist in superimposed states. Put another way, if you could solve the isolation problem it might end up to be cheaper to build the eigenstate computer with common cellular apparatus than by using big expensive lasers. What conclusions can you draw from this?

    I think this is what was meant by a prediction I once came across.. that the coming century would create a new science of computing which is to today's computers as nuclear energy is to fire.

    Like I said I hope someone can poke holes in this. The biggest problem seems to be universal laws about information, for example I understand that the recent sending of a light pulse at 300 times the ordinary speed of light was only possible because the leading edge of the pulse had enough information to reconstruct the rest of the pulse, suggesting that you could not send an entire packet of bits faster than the speed of light.

  • Re:Sad for SETI (Score:3)

    by carbon3C ( 209497 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @04:38AM (#775077)
    You're assuming that alien civilizations even know about radio waves. If they evolved with the ability to observe the "true quantum-wave reality" of our existence, then they might not be aware of the "radio waves" that appear as artifacts of some more fundamental medium. As far as we know, our precious "radio waves" are meaningless to other beings that may exist beyond our limited 4 dimensions.

  • Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data? (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16, 2000 @02:33AM (#775078)
    If one electron holds infinite data, how much do two electrons hold?

  • Sorry to burst the bubble... (Score:4)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Saturday September 16, 2000 @03:24AM (#775079) Homepage Journal
    But infinities and Real Life (tm) don't tend to mix very well...

    First off, at the sort of level you're talking about (single electrons), you're talking about a world that obeys Quantum Mechanics, not Newtonian Mechanics.

    This makes a big difference. Newtonian Mechanics is essentially continuous. Regardless of how close any two points are, Newtonian Mechanics assumes that there are still an infinite number of points between them, and that this can be repeated indefinitely.

    Quantum Mechanics is a strange land of discrete points with NO space between them, as far as the particle(s) under consideration are concerned. Particles jump from one state to another, WITHOUT passing any intermediate point.

    This means that what "should" be inifinite, given a purely Newtonian view of the world, will always become finite in a Quantum Mechanical view of the world.

    Space, Time, Energy - these are ALL quantized.

    The practical upshot? You may be able to store a LOT of information in an electron, but it won't be infinite. And how much you CAN store depends on what valid states there exist at that time, which may or may not remain the same over time.

  • Sad for SETI (Score:4)

    by warmcat ( 3545 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @02:40AM (#775080)
    I didn't see it mentioned, but this must be taking place at very low temperatures.

    When I hear about cool, promising advances like this is always makes me sorry for the SETI types. How the aliens will laugh themselves silly at our hopeful sifting of the *radio*/stone-age technology spectrum for traces of them, when an advanced civilization would have stupendously cooler ''magic'' at their disposal.

  • Re:Excited electrons (Score:4)

    by Robert Link ( 42853 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @04:20AM (#775081) Homepage
    I think you are probably right about the dynamic RAM issue. If you are putting the electron in anything but the ground state, then it will eventually decay, so you will have to referesh it periodically. I believe that is what the researcher is referring to when he says, ``Now we want to find out how long information can be stored.''


    It turns out that there are an infinite number of energy states between the ground state and the ionization threshold (look at a diagram of Hydrogen energy levels to see what I mean), so the amount of energy available is not a limiting factor. One practical limit is that the highly excited states are very closely spaced in energy. At some point they get too close for your apparatus to reliably read and write them. Also, when the thermal noise becomes comparable to the the spacing between states you are going to run into problems. I didn't notice any mention of temperature in the article, but I suspect they had to keep things pretty cold to avoid getting killed by noise.


    So, from the sound of it, it seems like you might conceivably be able to get down to something like one atom per register (which is still pretty amazing), but don't hold your breath waiting for a single-electron replacement for your HD, or even your L2 cache, for that matter.


    -rpl

  • Hold it... (Score:4)

    by efuseekay ( 138418 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @07:13AM (#775082)
    You are correct.....except that it is known that space-time _should_ also be quantized, so there is no such thing as "continuous eigenstates" , that's because QM is incomplete : we have not figured out quantum gravity yet (i.e. where it is believed that space-time curvature is also quantized).

    I know..I know, all QM books say there are continuous eigenstates. But that's because QM works on the Minkowski flat space-time metric which is perceived as "background-fixed", i.e. not a dynamic metric like General Relativity's metric. The goal of physicists is to find a way to make QM "background-free", i.e. does not rely on a fixed-metric, or put it another way, to "quantize gravity" (which nobody really knows what it means, but people believed it means quantizing the dynamic metric, or "quantizing Space-Time").

    So the people is pursuing a dream that is not viable.

  • stability? (Score:4)

    by martyb ( 196687 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @03:17AM (#775083)

    One of the challenges encountered with increasingly smaller data storage media is the possible damage caused by stray radiation... at this scale, one alpha particle could ruin your whole database! (or maybe one x-ray, or static electric shock, etc.)

    Although it is interesting to see just how much information could be encoded in a single electron, one would need some redundant electrons in other atoms to also encode the same information. (Think:RAQE a Redundant Array of Quantum Electrons.)

    Further, if we can step away from the concept of trying to encode EVERYTHING in just ONE electron, and take a look at how much information can easily and reliably be encoded in one electron (pulls a number out of his hat) say 4 bits, and one has (pulling another number out of his hat), say 10 electrons for redundancy, that's still one heck of a dense recording medium! Several terabytes of data could be stored in a very small space!

    How small a space? There's the unanswered question of just how close together these can be packed and uniquely targeted by the laser. (Or lasers, to speed reading/writing to the electrons.) I see issues with just trying to keep the atoms in a fixed location, how finely focused the laser beams can be adjusted, etc.

    Still, this sure holds promise for one incredibly dense storage medium for all my MP3s!

  • Re:Hold it... (Score:5)

    by jCaT ( 1320 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @08:05AM (#775084)
    *ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM* What the hell was that? Oh, it was this conversation *flying over my head*. I never knew that anyone who knew this much about quantum mechanics had time to read slashdot. :)

  • Re:Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data? (Score:5)

    by EZ-G ( 13881 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @03:00AM (#775085) Homepage

    The answer is correct but your reasoning is false.

    You took a bad example. The electron spin can only take values of plus or minus one half relative to an arbitrary quantization axis. When you measure the electron spin, you always measure one of the two of possible states, meaning that you can store exactly one bit in the electron spin.

    If you want to store more data in an electron, you have to use another physical quantity which has more possible states. (in qm jargon: Use an observable with has more (infinite) eigenstates). This is what the article talks about, they are using the "place" quantity (observable). As is easy to imagine, this observable has an infinity number of possible values (eigenstates): an electron can be anywhere.

  • disturbing trend (Score:5)

    by quux26 ( 27287 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @06:02AM (#775086) Homepage
    <HUMOR STYLE="dry">

    Call me cynical, but do those guys up in Slashland use MadLibs as a base for their stories?

    [person] writes, "[person, lab] has
    [verb]'d a way to [verb] the [noun]".
    Wow. How many [contested file format]'s
    could you [verb] with this??

    [person] writes, "the [hated industry]
    is [verb]ing [loved individual]". Ya know,
    there used to be a day when [verb] was not
    only legal but encouraged.

    [person] writes, "a [greek letter] release
    of [obscure linux app] has just hit [release
    site]'s page. Hoo boy, now our world is
    [adjective].

    </HUMOR>

    My .02
    Quux26

  • Re:But what about Heisenberg ? (Score:5)

    by JoeShmoe ( 90109 ) <askjoeshmoe@hotmail.com> on Saturday September 16, 2000 @04:40AM (#775087)
    Don't you watch Star Trek?

    We'll have Heisenberg compensators to take care of that.

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-

  • Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data? (Score:5)

    by King of the World ( 212739 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @02:42AM (#775088) Journal
    Can One Electron Hold Infinite Data?

    Yes.

    (though it depends wholy on the detail in which you can measure the state)

    Imagine an arrow. It can spin on it's centre of gravity 360 degrees. If it points directly left the bit value is 1. If it points right the bit value is 0.

    Going clockwise, pointing at the bottom half is for values the start with 0, the top half is for bit values starting with 1. Both have 180 degrees freedom of movement. Breaking the 180 degrees of each half into 2 points (3 sections) defines the second bit value. Iterate.

    Keep going and breaking smaller and smaller sections to define further bit values. 60 degrees down left would be 00, etc...

    Any real world thing (a bicycle for example) has an infinite number of possible states and your ability to reap binary values stops only at the limits of your measuring equipment.

    (you know, I spend too much time amusing myself.)

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