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Scientist Turn light into a " Supersolid " for the 1st time.






It's quite fascinating as photons are not matter, yet they exhibit matter like properties, carry energy and momentum and can exhibit particle like properties, photons demonstrate that there is still much about quantum mechanics that we don't yet fully understand.
 
I would need an independent team to duplicate this experiment before I can begin to believe this "super solid" is something real. I'm a very sceptical person at my core... :unsure:

If light can behave like a solid, wouldn't it still be moving very fast? I can believe light could act in strange new ways, BUT, I can't entertain the thought of somehow stopping light by forming some kind of "solid"??? 😱

Thanks for that, very interesting for sure, but it made my head hurt just thinking about it... ;)
 
From the sounds of it, this could lead to real-world applications in laser breakthroughs?

"excitons" and "polaritons" sounded like a load of bs-i-tons, until I did a Google search for the terms, which goes to show how far I'm behind I am on my general physics these days...:unsure:

If "Big Bang Theory" were still on the air, they'd make some episodes about this, might have even made it a major plot point for the show? It would have been better than "super asymmetry theory"...:p
 
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Yea I still have a hard time believing some of the quantum findings, like the double slit experiment where the pattern changes depending on if someone is watching or not.
Yea BBT was good thanks in no small part to Jim Parsons, Parsons is really talented, he practically made the movie HOME as good as it was.
That said more of today's fart joke television should include some real scientific info like BBT did, couldn't hurt anyway.
 
It's quite fascinating as photons are not matter, yet they exhibit matter like properties, carry energy and momentum and can exhibit particle like properties, photons demonstrate that there is still much about quantum mechanics that we don't yet fully understand.
It's still hard to wrap my head around light behaving like a particle (matter) and a wave (electromagnetic radiation) at the same time, and only whether or not it is being measured (looked at) does it behave like one or the other...

I can kind of understand the "looked at" part because no matter how you look at it (measure it), the act of the measurement has an impact on it. or something along those lines...
 
Exactly what I thought at 1st about the " looking at equipment " having an impact, but supposedly not the case.

The speed of light does some weird stuff, like slowing down the passage of time more and more the closer you get to it, now gravity induced time dilatation is easier to visualize when you think of the fabric of space time being distorted by the mass of planets, but velocity induced time dilatation is harder to visualize, however it exists in regular astrophysics calculations, even GPS has to account for time dilatation to be as accurate as it is.

It's said that if a vehicle could reach the speed of light it would become infinitely heavy, undergo length contraction and experience stand still time dilatation, actually no vehicle with mass could ever reach the speed of light AFAIK, so photons exhibiting physical properties at the speed of light is not as surprising as light being made a super solid when slowed down inside a gallium arsenide photonic crystal where a light is made to interact with itself.... wow, there is still so much I want to learn and so much that I expect is possible, we just have to discover how.
 
Makes you think, what disscoveries will we make over the next 100 years, 200 years, 300 years?!?

So much that none of us will be around for...
 
Yea, I like to think we could see something amazing come together in the next decade, but honestly I think robotics are what's going to change the world over the next couple of decades, not just replacing humans in factory jobs but in many jobs, but the real problem is how robotic police, robotic infantry will concentrate great power into the hands of a very few political elites, which if misused could create a great hardship only overcome through great sacrifice, time will tell.

p.s. I know, I know, sounds like a scene from I-Robot, however rather than happening all at once, the tyranny could ensue slowly over time, too many people are shallow lemmings caught up in their moment, easily manipulated by the mainstream feed, then by the time people start to take notice, their crys will fall of def ears, the globalist corporation owners and political elites will have the tools in place to truly dictate life.

Why doesn't it happen now you may ask, because soldiers and police have families too and they will only go so far, well in the US and European nations, but in some places around the world the enforcers will do horror to civilians, even if we omit 1940's Germany just look at some of the communist countries, now imagine robotic troops who never question orders, who have no empathy, the outcome could only be worse.
 
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That level of robotic tech is still a long way off. Don't get me wrong, they've come a long way in the mechanics of it, but they can't even get cars to stay between the lines at all times if the cars aren't preprogrammed with the exact route ahead of time, now imagine navigating the 3-dimensional space people occupy without knowing anything about it...

Sure, they can walk, run, jump, and even dance, lift boxes, and put them down over there, but those are still all preprogrammed and far from "on the fly" that they will need for even the first gen of robots in "I-Robot".

They are still working on general intelligence software for the most basic of operations, and it still takes up a mainframe of computing power for that, and there is the battery storage problem that they don't talk much about because it will need a lot of power to be even a little bit useful in the real world, I don't see my own robot doing basic tasks for me in my lifetime...
 
That's why I said the next couple of decades which is .... I think very possible, especially as there is financial incentive and global competition.
Elon Musk is planning to mass produce 500,000 Optimus robots by 2027 and the Boston Dynamics robot is using AI to think and change it's environment in order to complete tasks, it's not just step by step instruction anymore.
Just like many things it's crawl before walk, that said I expect we will see rapid advancement past a certain point not too far into the future, maybe 5 - 7 years, maybe a little less or more, but within 2 decades I expect it will be a different world, just like cars changed the horse and buggy world in pretty short order.

p.s. The self driving cars use HD maps and a combination of machine vision cameras, lidar, radar and GPS to navigate and they avoid obstacles in real time. ( usually )

Look at New York in 1905 and then in 1925

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watermark_1024_1.1925-RETOUCHED-5th_Avenue_Street_Scene-6462x6810.jpg
 
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