http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-pentagon-backed-cloak-clock.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...ysicists-say/2012/01/04/gIQA5rtwaP_story.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...ity-harry-potter-light-optical-fiber-science/
40 trillionths of a second. LOL. It will be some time before they can extend that to a practical duration.
Pssshhh nerds smoke the reefer for the very first time, think they discovered everything by writing it down.
Exaggeration? Psh. This is America! I'm waiting for a new comic book superhero or hollywood movie to now fully exploit this concept.
interesting, but I find it hard to believe they could create a much larger gap without making it detectable. Who knows. Still, at this point, seems like they're calling a light switch a time machine just because they turned it on and off so fast that no one noticed... and that's a bit of a stretch.
I think the gap size is not what should be changed. It should be the frequency (i.e. how many gaps). So if the gap is 40 trillionths of a second and the "size" of the beam is 1 trillionth. You could hypothetically send a lot of gaps in a second. It would be like a high speed fan with small blade width or car rims with thin spokes. Moving at high speeds, it seems more of a blur or almost invisible. But do this in the opposite direction. The spokes would be huge compared to the gap. You could put data in that gap and never notice it.
Until they can somehow figure out a way to compact the distance element required (in order to make something "disappear" for a full second, they need 18,600 miles of fiber optics!!), this is just a whim. However, it's still pretty cool that they are able to manipulate light and time to alter the reality that we see.....even if it is for literally a fraction of a second.
Time is a very intriguing thing. People tend to forget how strange even the concept of time is. Time is something we deal with but there is no universal concept of time. Time is all relative to every observer in our existance. Further, time is a byproduct of the strength of gravity. Time distortion can just be viewed as a measure of gravitation strength. I mean come on...how ****ing nuts is that? And how odd is it that we are trapped by the flow of time? We are stuck moving along in time no matter what we do. This idea along with many other things relating to consciousness and reality have been causing me a good deal of distress the more I have thought about it. Anyhow, I think another interesting and strange thing about time is that everything except extremely small spaces it only flows in one direction. Interestingly, light only seems to go in one direction, except in extremely small spaces. Over larger spaces light does move in every direction possible, but go unnoticed due to these movements cancelling each other out. I think this is inspiring me to pick my QED book back up. I put it down because every few sentences I read would leave me dumbfounded with the nature of reality. It seemed like I was getting less and less reading done and I would just sit there and stare off trying to comprehend what I was being told about the basics of light.
