And now... Newtons's Balls!?!

Here it is, Friday morning, Connal is off to school, and sweety is sleeping peacefully upstairs. And with time to drink some coffee (with caffeine this time thank you.) And read the news (a lot of which is bad.) We came across a few news stories that brightened our spirits almost as much as the warmer weather and copious sunshine have done for us lately. The first story is probably going to be a bit confusing, but believe us, it's worth the brain bend. It seems that Masahiro Hotta as found a way to transmit energy from one point to another, without losing any of the energy potential, or in any way heating the conduit between the two points. Which is a chain of subatomic particles. (Think Newtons Balls, nooo not THOSE balls, (you people really should clean up your minds a little) Remember those balls on chains that executives have on their desks, where you swing the one ball and it hits the next causing a chain reaction which causes the last ball in the line to swing out and back again. Those are called Newtons Balls. use that as an image when thinking this through.) Hotta has used Schroedingers wave function (explained a bit in an earlier blog entry) to design a way to transmit energy from point A to point B at the speed of light. You can imagine the potential uses for this idea... they are unlimited. It works like this. (Prepare for serious brain bending) a string of entangled ions oscillate back and forth in an electric field trap, Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn't travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. Hotta is calling this teleportation. But since the potential energy is still sitting on the first ion, we think it should be called creation. Those of you who have ever watched Star Trek (and we know who we are don't we.) Remember the food synthesizer. The idea Masahiro Hotta has come up with could actually be put to such use. (Ok, we understand how far fetched the whole idea sounds, but the potential is there. The technology is not.) It may be centuries before the full impact and effect of Masahiro Hotta's idea come to full fruition. But we at the crazy are certainly pleased to see these sorts of ideas being put to use. I guess we don't have time to get to the second article of good news today. So we will leave that for another blog entry. Just more of this weird and wild world we live in. May quantum particles fill your brain. (Oh wait, they already do.) Ciao for now.