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Science

Stopping Light 243

Posted by Hemos from the but-isn't-it-just-night? dept.
Jon Abbott writes "NASA is reporting that physicists at Harvard University have managed to stop light altogether. The implications of this discovery are rather staggering -- quantum encryption and quantum computers might be just around the corner! " Well, I don't think this will mean any immediate changes - but it is a significant step.
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Stopping Light More

Stopping Light

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  • Very, Very Slow Computers (Score:4, Funny)

    by waldoj ( 8229 ) <<waldo> <at> <jaquith.org>> on Friday March 29, 2002 @01:44PM (#3248530) Homepage Journal
    The implications of this discovery are rather staggering - quantum encryption and quantum computers might be just around the corner!

    Yeah...very, very, very slow quantum computers.

    ;)

    -Waldo Jaquith
  • I was able to stop time!



    But only for a second...
  • What are the applications for pausing light? The article only spoke of applications for removing and creating light.
    • There's all kinds of quantum parameters you could alter, and so you could do something like code data into the light's quantum parameters and be able to store HUGE amounts of data.
      You could also do cool shit like make light transistors for quantum computers--they wouldn't get that hot, and they'd move SCREAMINGLY fast.
  • But what happens when light stops? It just doesn't sit there patiently for the next command, does it? I'm not a physics guy, but if light is energy, you just can't stop energy.

    Colour me confused.
    • you just can't stop energy.

      True, but you can contain it. Think of lead-acid batteries, flywheels, or any other energy storage device. The energy becomes somewhat of a potential (although in flywheels the energy is rotational), and can later be turned into useful energy.

    • Re:Stopping light altogether? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The energy of the light is stored in the spinning atoms. This energy causes them to change from a base quantum state to an excited state. When they shine the second laser on the atoms, the energy is released in the form of the original laser.
    • The energy itself isn't really "stopped", it's transformed into a different form. When the photons of light impact an atom, it leaves an imprint (in the form of a spin). So, each unique wavelength of light leaves a unique imprint which can then be fetched at a later date by another laser pulse (or so the article says) Hope that sheds some light on the subject. :P
    • Light isnt actually stopped it is absorbed by the atoms in the medium.

      So those atoms go on a higher energy state, as a result of the light they have absorbed.

      When they shine another laser on the medium the atoms emit the energy they had previously absorbed, in the form of the same kind of light that came in.

    • Re:Stopping light altogether? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Telastyn ( 206146 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @01:52PM (#3248589)
      From what I understand this is more akin to storage and retransmission.

      The energy itself I believe is lost, though the waveform of the light, and its pattern is stored in the arrangement/orientation of the atoms. Shining another light into the atoms causes the eminating light to be of the same waveform/pattern.

      A better analogy would be intercepting a streaming movie going across your network, waiting a while, and then re-transmitting it. You're not sending the same electrons, but you're sending the same bits.
    • but if light is energy

      Haven't had this discussion in years, so I, too, may be wrong. But IIRC Einstein proved that light is particles that moved like energy (in a waveform).

      • IIRC Einstein proved that light is particles that moved like energy (in a waveform).

        Sort of. It was shown that particles behave like waves and vice versa. Thus, since light is a wave it can also be thought of as a particle. We refer to this particle as a photon.

        However, it's not a particle in the same way as an electron or a cookie crumb. It has no mass and, thus, exists only in the form of energy.
    • My read is that it's just the information about the light that's stopping: wave amplitude and frequency. This information is imprinted on a non-moving medium (spin states of the atoms) and then released later when the atoms are excited: a wave released with the same properties of the incoming wave that was absorbed.

      I can't see what the technical reason is for saying dramatically that this information is "stored" and not "absorbed" - looks like it's just arguing about the spin [ :) ] of the story. I'm not a physics guy either and sometimes I think they try too hard to mystify and dramatize the terminology when it's moved from math to English (especially on "Isn't it a wonderful time to be alive"-NASA press releases).

  • Last year (Score:5, Informative)

    by 0xB ( 568582 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @01:46PM (#3248543)
    And here's [space.com] the story from when it was news, last year.

    • Re:Last year (Score:2, Informative)

      by 0xB ( 568582 )
      And /.'s coverage (18th Jan 2001) [slashdot.org]

    • Nothing new (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Stop light? This is nothing new. We have stop lights at every major intersection.

    • The worst part about this story (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sllort ( 442574 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @02:00PM (#3248653) Homepage Journal
      is not that it's a year old Slashdot repeat; we're used to that. The problem is that the whole "stopping light" headline that all the mainstream journalists (who should know better) carry on it is baloney.

      If a photon (light) hits an atom (matter), causing it's electrons to move to a more excited energy level, I defy you to "show me the light". You can't. You can show me a really excited electron, and if you're really clever like these folks at Harvard you can even get that atom to release the exact same light with the exact same waveform, but you haven't stopped light.

      It's annoying. How hard is it to say you've "trapped" light?

  • slow glass... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cowtamer ( 311087 )
    There was an old sci-fi story about "slow glass" where people would let these light-storing windows in interesting places and then sell them.

    This really sounds like a cool way of storing holographic data (which means storing a LOT of information in a small space)

  • seems like... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ultramk ( 470198 ) <{ultramk} {at} {pacbell.net}> on Friday March 29, 2002 @01:46PM (#3248546)
    this story was stopped, held, and reemitted... [slashdot.org]

    -m

  • whoa! (Score:2, Funny)

    by TheCyko1 ( 568452 )
    wow... so they finally found the light switch... -Cyko
    • wow... so they finally found the light switch...

      Hey, I just managed to stop light by shining my flashlight at the wall. When I looked on the other side of the wall- NO LIGHT WAS COMING THROUGH!

  • ...stop that damn beam of light that hits my eyes every friggin' morning at 6:30am.

  • They did NOT stop light! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by forand ( 530402 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @01:49PM (#3248562) Homepage
    Ok this is just a point of fact: they did not stop light! They stored the information contained initially in a light wave in a new medium that they had control over, then were able to stimulate the medium to get it to re-emit.
    • I didn't run that red light, my car did! I was merely along for the ride! ;p
    • They stored the information AND the energy associated with light, didn't they? The medium absorbed the energy and the information associated with the photons in one side of the medium, then re-emited it out of the other side (albeit with stimulation), so how is that not stopping it?
      Either the photons stopped, or they are floating around in the imaginary universe you live in (just kidding).
      Just because you are storing it in a different form doesn't mean you aren't stopping it. Yeah, they may not be the exact same photons, but since photons are massless particles anyways, it's hard to define the Newtonian definition of "stopping" and "going."

    • Re:They did NOT stop light! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's been awhile since my quantum mechanics classes but I believe that storing all the quanum properties of a photon and imprinting them onto another is essintially the same thing as stopping and starting it.

      Since a particle or photon is defined as the sum of all of its properties, if you are able to create another instance of the photon that has all of those properties, you've managed to duplicate the photon. It is, for all intents and purposes, the _same_ photon.

      Fortunately, no two quantum particles can share the same properties. So as soon as you, form your duplicate, the original ceases to exist. (Technically, the uncertainty princple says that it ceased to be the same particle as soon as you started measuing the properties in the first place.)

      Back when I heard about teleportation experiments they were doing just that. A photon's quantum properties were measured and imparted them to another photon some distance away. According the quantum mechanics, the photon teleported.

      It sounds like a similar process may be happening here.

  • An interesting one, although I remember /. posting the comment before. The concept really gets into gear, though, when you consider the guys who have been creating optical computers using a diamond spinning at very high speeds (they are able to perform calculations by creating minuite variations in the speed of the spinning crystal). If you can make a calculation, flash it to your new 'hard disk' (or rather, gas-light tank) and beam it out again whenever you need it, all at the speed of light and no resistance if done in a vacuum, then you get very energy-efficient, relatively easy/cheap to build computers. I don't know what their speeds would be compared to today's computers - probably lower, since electronics is quite a few generations ahead in development - but the potential is enough to be interesting.

    - Jynx
  • I'm able to stop light with my bare hands (or at least scatter and reflect it ;)

  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by sharkey ( 16670 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @01:50PM (#3248569)
    It was not destroyed or absorbed, but rather stored -- ready to emerge intact at the scientists' bidding.

    I can just see physicists getting calling people into the lab, turning out the lights and commanding, "Let There Be LIGHT!!!" at every available opportunity

  • My Town has tons of theses. (Score:5, Funny)

    by BiggestPOS ( 139071 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @01:51PM (#3248576) Homepage
    They tend to call them "Red Lights" though. I wanna transporter, now.
  • Wasn't this story just on /. a few weeks ago?
  • it lends a whole new meaning to breaking something by "letting the smoke out".

    :-)
  • In fact, there are several stopping lights at intersections just blocks from my house!
  • After stopping light is pretty easy, it's the pausing that tuff.
  • There's an explanation of why stopping light could lead to advances in quantum computing here [com.com].

    There's also some news about it here [harvard.edu] at Harvard's site. Also, there's an article here [sciam.com] in Scientific American about this.

    Didn't this all happen last year, too? Why is it just news now?
  • They stopped light last year. Theres even a guy whos trying to rewind light.

    This is just old news, The way light was stopped before was they used extreme cold to slow light down until it stopped.

  • This really is vaporware!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by CProgrammer98 ( 240351 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @01:55PM (#3248621) Homepage
    From the article Walsworth and Hau used vapors (rubidium and sodium) to pause light. Will the insides of quantum computers be vaporous as well?
    So it truly is vaporware!

  • could this be used for really high density portable storage?

    Would shaking the storage container make atoms discharge and ruin the whole thing?
  • Do you have any idea how many atoms you can fit in something the size of a CD? That's a lot of data to store MP3's on!
  • stopping light can actually be used for information storage -- ie hard disks. Doing so would increase the amount of storage space incredibly (less space needed for data), reliability would go up (ie, less chance of disk failure), and data transfer speed would finally match CPU speed (no more RAID arrays, and maybe even no more I/O caching).
    • Reliability would not go up. Think about this: what happens when you read the data back? Well, you'd have to make the light move again. Great, but what happens when you read it again? There's no more stored light, so there's nothing you could get out of this.

      You could, of course, read it and re-write it. But, this, too, has problems with it -- you need lasers to do all your dirty work, so you're still limited by the speed of the switching electronics on them. Hmm...

      Basically, without some serious work being done, this can't become the mass storage revolution we're all hoping for.

  • p=mv (Score:3, Interesting)

    by loydcc ( 325726 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @01:57PM (#3248634) Journal
    If the momentum of the particle nature of light is true then it's mass must be infinate if velocity is zero. But that doesn't say anything about it's wave nature. Since the light is stopped we know it's momentum. So we can't know it's position. Since the light is contained in an area we know it's approximate position but not it's certain position. Therefore the light is not actually stopped as position has some wiggle room. Which ipmlies a change in position over time.

    I just don't believe they stopped the light.

    • Not quite (as somebody pointed out, p=mv isn't correct for photons, or, for that matter, when v gets up to a significant fraction of c). However, what is correct is that, because photons are massless, they cannot move at a speed less than c -- A photon is always travelling at 3e8 m/s. So you're right in thinking that they didn't stop the photons (which is certainly what 'stopping light' implies.)
    • Doesn't matter anyway though because such equations only apply to particles with mass. Since light travels at the speed of light, it cannot have momentum or mass.

      Einstein was a pretty smart guy...
  • For PSY - Ops, most likely for holograms to confuse and disorient enemies. Kinda like that machine the holodeck from startrek

  • Tiwice Before (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Slashdot Jan. 2002 [slashdot.org]

    Slashdot Jan. 2001 [slashdot.org]
  • There are a handful new (or at least vastly improved) technologies that will be developed and put into use in the near future that will rival the changes ushered in by the developement of the microchip. This could happen much sooner than most people think, maybe as soon as 4 or 5 years. Quantum computing will be one. It will be crude and a lot of people will look upon it the same the that the Altair or the GUI developed by Werox PARC, but advances will happen fast once things get moving. Nanotechnology will be another. Tiny machines that can clean out clogged arteries will be "neat" but this will really be useful in materials developement. Once we can custom build materials at the atomic level, things will get interesting in a hurry. Being able to stop light is something that sounds pretty obscure, but then so was a little hunk of silicon Bell Labs touted 50 some years ago. I've talked to some people who were working in the electronics industry when the transistor was first talked about. A lot of them at the time thought "Well, that's neat, but that thing will never be able to handle any serious current. Intel made a real gamble in the 70's with their little "calculator-on-a-chip", the microprocessor, that they made in the hopes of selling it to a Japanese calculator manufacturer. It will be interesting to see what comes down the road from what these people did with stopping light.
  • The most recent edition of Discover [discover.com] has an article on quantum encryption using single photons.

    Basically they shoot a laser through a heavy filter, emitting only one photon. The Sender and Receiver exchange pads including what group of spins(Horizontal/Vertical, or the diag's) on each photon contains information. An Evesdropper has a 50% chance of guessing which one, and retransmiting that. The article state that on average 25% of the photons would be incorrect if your conversation was being intercepted due to wrong guesses by the snooper.
    Pretty Neat - but they say it'll be at least 10 years for something that consumers can plug into a wall...
  • It seems the scientists didn't really stop light, but rather imprinted it onto atoms, and them by shining another laser through they could repricate the original light. Now, this is quite useful but not the same thing as stopping light alltogether. For example, this couldn't be done in a vacuum such as space just because there are no (or very few) atoms to imprint upon.

    As for quantum computing this is a big step. They have basically discovered how to imprint something onto atoms, each of which could be a bit (or trit or more, depending on how they implement it) so basically you have an immense ammount of storage in a very small space. Between this and the speed of light that signals would be sent with, you would have a very fast computer with enormous ammounts of memory.

    Oh, and as for portable storage, a floppy disk will be able to hold terrabytes of information.
  • If someone wanted to transport a highly sensitive document over the world without using a network. I could see light waves being a highly secure medium. Send 4 encrypted "bottles of light" to the destination... and have each one of the bottles be 1/4 of the information. If someone steals on of the 4 bottles... or if one of them is damaged... no message is recieved at the other end.

    Granted the machinary that would pick up a half meter of light from a "bottle of light" would have to do a lot of quick calculation... unless they released it slowly... like their previous experiments to get light to move at a bicycles pace.
    The nice thing about light as a storage medium is that the molocules would be infinely close in proximity of one another. If a given the burst technology existed I guess the only thing slowing this down would be the pulse rate that could be achieved from a laser source. I could imagine a line of light, no longer than a football field that contains more information than the current internet.

    --Turvey

  • Great news for quantum computing (Score:5, Informative)

    by laertes ( 4218 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @02:07PM (#3248688) Homepage

    I've noticed a couple of people wondering why this discovery important. Some other people know that it is useful for quantum computing, but they don't know how it would be useful. I'll see if I can help.

    The most common way qubits are stored in quantum computers is as spin, which can be thought of as angular momentum, quantum-style. The particle usually used for this task is the electron. So, now we've got the qubit stored as spin, but how do we get the different particle's spin states to interact? If we can't get them to interact, we can't do any computation, so this is a very important question.

    The most successful quantum computers (those with 7 qubits) so far use Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to make the qubits interact. This has it's problems, and would not be appropriate for a real quantum computer. So, to make a real (ie. Desktop) QC, we need something better.

    This story talks about a method of turning information stored in light (as amplitude, IIRC) into spin. This sort of translation is exactly what is needed to make quantum computers work. An example QC could use a bunch of atom's as the memory system, with all of the qubits encoded as spin on the electrons orbiting the atoms. The CPU would be a bunch of optical components (beam splitters, polarizers, mirrors, etc.) that operate kind of like transistors. And the wires would just be fiber optics. Now, this is a little simplified, because it assumes we can make atomic scale optical components, but I am confident that it will happen soon.

    Hope this helps some people understand why this is Stuff that matters.

  • How I learned to love the bomb sorta (Score:3, Informative)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @02:23PM (#3248762)
    This is the four thousandth time this article has been posted here and it is still doesn't follow. Nobody is freezing photons, they're just getting them stuck in the middle of some molecules so they have to wait for another laser to be able to knock the photons loose again. Stopping photons is not the same as trapping them.
    • That's the problem with quantum mechanics. The mechanisms are so odd, that many words used to describe it give a false idea of what is actually happening. Light is being slowed most certainly, to the point where one could say that it is stopped. Remember though, light does not have mass, so it is not analogous to slowing down a baseball until its caught.

      Likewise, thinking of it in terms of an atom absorbing the photon is incorrect. It's not the same as dropping a bit of dye into a glass of water, where the water absorbs the photon. It's also not a trap for the photon.

      The first thing in understanding quantum mechanics is to first accept that atoms have no real-world counterpart. One cannot imagine an atom or subatomic particles as we imagine physical objects.

      Its whacky stuff.

  • Quantum Computing with Perl (Score:4, Funny)

    by medcalf ( 68293 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @02:24PM (#3248774) Homepage
    my @quanta;

    @quanta=;

    foreach $quanta (@quantum)
    {
    warn "DAMN! destroyed my data by reading it again!\n";
    }

  • Light wasn't stopped. Misleading headline. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Slashdot and articles in general on the net are so misleading when it comes to anything related to physics. Where do you people come from? Leave the physics to physicist. Anyway, they didn't "stop" light. This is nothing more than a simple setup (in theory) that's based on what any grad physics student must do (time dependant pertubation theory). The light perturbs the spin 1/2 states of the Rb with off diagonal matrix elements that mix states. The polarization of the light with respect to the Rb is also very important. The physics going on here is what you could call Rabi flops. It's a simple time dependant pertubation theory problem that is exactly solvable and can be reduced to two by two subspaces. As far as the physics goes, they've done nothing all that new or exciting. The only advances they've made are perhaps technical advances in setting things up.

  • Sure. (Score:5, Funny)

    by msm1th ( 68753 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @02:30PM (#3248805)
    Slashdot is so silly sometimes it makes my head hurt.

    Headline: Physicists Stop Light
    Slashdot: The implications for quantum computing are staggering!

    Headline: Transparent Aluminum Invented
    Slashdot: The implications for case mods are staggering!

    Headline: Secret of Time Travel Discovered
    Slashdot: Yay! We don't have to wait 2 years to see the rest of [insert name of trilogy]!

    Headline: Scientists Cure Cancer
    Slashdot: The implications for quantum computing are staggering!

    Headline: Terrorists Nuke South Dakota
    Slashdot: The implications for quantum computing are staggering!
    • ... not many Slashdotters killed.

      [cf. Small Earthquake in Peru for the humor impaired moderators]

      • Bah (Score:2)

        by cje ( 33931 )
        You might be surprised how many Slashdotters are in South Dakota.
        • Well, since there are fewer /.ers than South Dakotans (by a factor of almost 2), I suppose all of them could be there.

          Actually there seem to be a lot of Minnesotan /.ers in comparison to the amount of high tech in the state. Or maybe I just notice it because I live here.

          I smell a poll. Is CowboyNeal reading?
    • Headline: Terrorists Nuke South Dakota
      Slashdot: The implications for case mods are staggering!

      -
  • before everyone gets all excited, please keep in mind that the light pulse could only be stopped for something on the order of 100ms. the information about the light pulse is stored in the spin state of the atoms, which are told to release the information by another, perpendicular, laser beam.

    but this phase information is quickly lost as the atoms move around in a thermal equilibrium. think about it as sky-writing. the information is written there, but as the particles move around the infomatino is quickly lost.

    most of these experiments have been done with UltraCold atom clouds, and the most recent ones (presented at DAMOP last year) were done in Bose-Einstein Condensates.

    due to the very short "coherence time", this phenomena is most likely not very useful for quantum computing.

    the buzzwords to look for when it comes to quantum computers (i.e. the things most likely to work) are "trapped ions" and "optical lattices". i promise, one of those two will be used in the first functional quantum computer.

    muerte

  • Is this really news, or hasn't this been done...

    before? [nature.com]

    or before? [sciencenews.org]

    -D
  • From the article: And nothing is certain -- only probable or improbable.

    Damn, it seems we're getting close to the Improbability Drive.

    "That's a good name --- ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?" Thud!

  • Old hat (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hal-9001 ( 43188 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @02:45PM (#3248874) Homepage Journal
    This was published in Nature over a year ago (25 January 2001 to be precise). This article (PDF format) [nature.com] is a nonspecialist introduction to this work, and this article (PDF format) [nature.com] is the peer-reviewed research article from Nature.
  • The Smith family (complete with mom, dad and 2 children) is taking a 4-hour trip to Grandma's... Kid 1: Mom, are we there yet? Mom: No (Repeat 15x) Kid 2: How long's it going to be? Dad: Ok kids, if you don't keep quiet back there I'll split you up into an uncountable number of atomic particles and stow you away in your Ronald McDonald sippy cup until we get there! Kid 1: ... Kid 2: ...
  • ...is how they release it? Anyone has clues?

    They can absorb light into a container, alter the qubits (how?), and then, how do they send it off again? Opening a quvalve?

    Some quEstions require quAnswers.

    These bozos need to document a bit more if I'm to build one myself (ok... maybe I'm optimistic).

  • DMCA Violation? (Score:3, Funny)

    by lynx_user_abroad ( 323975 ) on Friday March 29, 2002 @04:01PM (#3249298) Homepage Journal
    "Suppose you have some information encoded in atoms," says Walsworth. "You could map that information onto light, send it over to some other group of atoms, and imprint the information there."

    In other news, the RIAA filed suit today against God for failing to include Digital Rights Management technology with each atom, in violation of the SSSCA, and for providing an anti-circumvention mechanism within His "Laws of Physics" prodict.

    "This will destroy the music industry as we know it!" exclaimed an unnamed music industry representative, "Evil Hackers will be able to use this technology to pirate music off of even protected CD's, because they're all made of atoms!"

    God was contacted for comment on these developments, but apparently prefers only to listen, and not reply.

  • I've been doing that for years. Ever since I learned how to use the light swtich.
  • someone else has just discovered how to let light in. It is not know yet if their product's name will be contested by Microsoft Corp.
  • The article mentions experiment from 1999 where light was slowed to the "bicycle speed". This was accomplished by shining light trough "Bose-Einstein" condensate. Bosons are particles with integer spin (e.g. photons). In 1924 it was predicted that an ensemble of bosons could, under certain conditions, undergo a phase transition. This is analogue to vapor condensation or crystallization of liquid. In order to create Bose-Einstein condensate it is necessary to achieve temperatures less than one millionth of a degree above absolute zero. First successful experiment was performed in 1995 utilizing laser cooling. One of the properties of BE condensate is that the light propagates trough it with speed that is 20-million-fold slower than a speed of light in vacuum.
    The article is not very informative about actual physics involved in the newest experiment. However there is a nice description at: http://www.aip.org/physnews/update/521-1.html.
    Also there is a an interesting site about Bose-Einstain condensation at

    http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/index.h tm l,
    with some nifty Java applets
  • The Palestinian-Israeli conflict will be resolved, global warming reversed, and world hunger ended. I am definitely staggered.

    (having one of those days when these sorts of breakthroughs seem ever so slightly irrelevant to the future of life on Earth - could you tell?)

  • Next they reduced the intensity of the signal laser until the polariton was 100% atomic. There were no photons left inside the chamber.

    There were no photons, people. They didn't stop light. Halted light would mean there are photons in there, moving at exactly zero meters per second. There were no photons left.
  • One step closer to a working light saber. Thank you Harvard!

  • Am I the only one who thinks it's strange that while we get told about all these fantastic things that can be done which weren't possible a year ago, people still say convincingly that "you can't get the state from the system without leaving finger prints" ?

    I'm sure we can't today. And I'm equally sure that someone is going to figure out a way to touch the system so insignificantly that the "reading" cannot be measured.

    Like when reading from a hard-drive: Of course the head will alter the state of the platter when passing by - it's just so insignificant that it doesn't matter, and it would probably be hard to measure if anybody tried.

    While this is fascinating and all, I just don't buy into the "can't cheat with this one". Many years ago, everyone agreed that you couldn't split an aton - which was natural, because "the atom" itself was a relatively new idea in itself at that time.

    I find it hard to believe that the progress stops here.
  • ... on New Year's Day. Millions of hungover people will thank them for stopping that godawful light ...
  • This is really old news and not even "technology." Following the examples in California and this ENRON thing, it's clear that stopping light isn't so much a technical marvel as it is poor management.

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