Physicists have for the first time stopped and extinguished a light pulse in one part of space and then revived it in a completely separate location. They accomplished this feat by completely converting the light pulse into matter that travels between the two locations and is subsequently changed back to light
This has a very sci-fi type of potential. It reminds me of a quote by Stanley kubric
“I’d be very surprised if the universe wasn’t full on an intelligence of an order that to us would seem god-like… There are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone and approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe… so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe… where intelligent life… is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millenia- less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe-can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from a biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities- and then, over innumberable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.”
Not exactly sure on that one… light is weird. I’m studying it in physics right now. But I didn’t think that you could stop it, carry it around in your hand, then turn it back into super fast light!
Ummm, I think it’s the wave particle thing. Light is a wave and light is a particle that they taught us in school. I never understood it. I think it’s quantum mechanics that explains it.
What the wave particle bit means is that light behaves like both a particle and a wave. It’s not really either, it’s just an analogy.
And they only moved the light “eight-thousandths of an inch”, and it doesn’t seem like it’s the same light. It says they moved the “fingerprint” of the light on a cloud of atoms from one cloud to another, and that they used a laser in the second cloud to coax out light . I think the language of the post and the title of the article are more sensationalist thatn they should be. Sure, the applications for this technology are great, but it’s not as wacky as it’s been described. It’s the information that is being carried over, not the thing itself.
There’s a difference between saying that light is both and light behave as both, but it is almost an arbitrary difference. Light definitely behaves much like macroscopic waves and like macroscopic particles. Since we are macroscoping animals, we relate the behavior that we have inferred to macroscopic things. But light is very different from our macroscopic comparrison. In the everyday world, being a wave and a particle is a contradiction. Waves travel in a medium, light does not. Particles do not cancel each other our. Really, to say that light is both a wave and a particle is to redefine “wave” and “particle”, and it is not useful. Really, it some other third thing that behaves as both in various contexts.
And as for movement, if something moves the Planck length, it is nothing special. Sure movement is movement, but certain moves are more significant than others
No not really, light neither has mass at least as far as anyone has been able to determine, nor does it have some sort of size as we would think of it. It is to all intents and purposes energy.
E=mc^2 shows that energy can be converted to mass and vice a versa. But light to mass I’d have to see in a more credible source, it’s definitely possible, but I’d like to see some sort of paper or something before I’d comment.
If anyone’s interested particles can spontaneously appear from the vacuum, they are very short lived and incur a debt to time in accordance with physics laws, this is thought to be responsible for the Casimir effect and this soup of “virtual” particles is called vacuum energy.
But it does demonstrate matter can appear from energy. And of course we know the contrary is true, the atomic experiments of the second world war showed that quite clearly, amongst the more obvious examples
I like to think of light as a warticle, neither but both. And the above explanation is pretty good, it’s useless to think of it terms of either, just exhibiting properties of both. What is it exactly? Good question
Yes, theoretically. But we can’t, so it is only theory. The Non-spatial has a distance from the spatial. That speed depends on what momentum we are talking about.
The photon is non-spatial and the non-spatial imparts our motion, or reality.
All things in the spatial are at different speeds and constantly changing. Nothing you know of that is in the three dimensions is without motion.
The wave crest measurement (soliton, we get this wave from the electron/photon relationship) is our pace. This pace, or speed, is a motion away from the non-spatial.
Seeing as what is spatial must lose complexity to reach the non-spatial, it is impossible for anything spatial to influence the non-spatial. We cannot influence a photon. Do do so we would have to simplify to the non-spatial, and then we’d be a photon.
