Something pretty awesome happened recently in the science world that must be driving student and hobbyist physicists and quantum mechanics bonkers.
Teams from both Imperial College London and Trinity College Dublin discovered a new form of light.
The science is pretty wild. A team took a particle of light and bound it to an electron in a process that I, personally, can’t quite wrap my head around. It’s awesome. Already, data communication companies are sniffing around this breakthrough because of its implications for faster and more secure transmissions.
But that’s just the short term.
This new light particle can do something that scientists thought was impossible: Defies Planck’s constant. It bends without using a whole value. So cool!
But this discovery, this new light, could have more profound applications in the end. New types of telescopes, new types of computers, new ways to harness light energy could be discovered.
Better still, it’s another step closer in functional AI. Robots. I love robots and AI and maybe we’ll be able to create a being like Cortana before half the century is out. Would love to talk to her.
Light is literally in the lives of everything on this planet in a mind boggling amount of ways, from flashlights and X-Ray machines to the photosynthesizing food we eat and how we talk to each other. Maybe one day, the very thing that helped keep our world from being a cold, dead husk will take us in directions we never thought possible.
Talk about the light of discovery.
T.A. Creech
Author of LGBT romance and speculative fiction.