Science fiction great Arthur C. Clarke used to say that all sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Here’s another case in point, this one from CBC News (Canada), via Tesday’s Schwartzreport. The significance? It seems to me that this is the predecessor of yet another huge breakthrough in information storage and transference. If they learn to store data on photons, the requirements for data transmission presumably decline accordingly, bringing economic costs further toward zero and — more importantly — suddenly making practical a host of applications that won’t occur to us for years.
‘Sounds Impossible,’ But U.S. Team Put Image Into Single Photon
CBC News (Canada)
American researchers have put all the data from an image into a single photon, one of the particles that make up light and other electromagnetic phenomena.
The team was also able to retrieve the data, the letters UR for the University of Rochester where lead researcher John Howell is an associate professor of physics.
“It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we’re storing an entire image,” he said in a release Monday.
“While the initial test image consists of only a few hundred pixels, a tremendous amount of information can be stored with the new technique,” the researchers said in describing the experiment as an “optics breakthrough.”
Alan Willner, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, endorsed the experiment in the release.
“The parallel amount of information John has sent all at once in an image is enormous in comparison to what anyone else has done before,” he said. “It’s a wonderful achievement.”
The UR was made by sending a single photon through a stencil with U and R etched out. The photon carried the shadow of the UR with it into a cell of cesium gas, where it was slowed and compressed, so many pulses could be held there at the same time.
“Squeezing that much information into so small a space and retrieving it intact opens the door to optical buffering - storing information as light,” the team said.
Optical buffering is important because it’s seen as one way to speed up computers - by using light to store information - but there are problems converting light signals to electronic signals.
The research appeared in Monday’s online issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
January 25th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
I recently read that from a theoretical perspective, a single photon has the capacity to carry and transmit an inifinite amount of information. This capacity is apparently due to a property of all individual photons–orbital angular momentum (OAM). I do not know if the above findings are theoretically related to OAM.
In any event, as a psychologist who is interested in a possible scientific understanding of what might be generally called “after-death experiences”, I have found myself drawn to the fields of physics (optics) and biophysics. Another line of research in the field of biophysics (e.g. F.A. Popp) indicates that all living systems continually emit coherent light. The possiblity that this emitted light (biophotons) somehow maintains all of the information of the emitting system (which is then immediately transferred into a timeless and spaceless realm, according to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity), seems to provide a promising lead for an eventual scientific understanding of soul/spirit.