From: Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jan 29 1997 - 00:46:53 MST
Well, first they said they've got atom lasers.
Then they said they've got the first qubit for quantum computers.
Then they said the atom laser has been tested and actually works.
I figure that if we can just keep up this rate of progress for the next
week, we'll have full-scale nanotechnology.
Cross your fingers...
Oh, and by the way, from
http://www.aip.org/physnews/preview/1997/alaser/text.htm#9
> An atom wave is a quantum-mechanical wave
> which can never be observed directly, but only when it combines or
> interferes with similar quantum-mechanical waves to produce a pattern of
> light and dark fringes. When two atom waves interfere, an atom making up
> one wave can cancel out an atom from the other wave. "When matter waves
> interfere destructively," explains Ketterle, "it is as if one atom plus one
> atom gives zero atoms. Of course, the matter is not destroyed, and appears
> elsewhere. Nevertheless, the interference of streams of atoms from
> separate sources is a dramatic phenomenon."
Gosh, I always wondered how those transporters on Star Trek worked.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:05 MST