Freaky Science.

[swestrup]

Okay, this one is right up there with the quantum entanglement of holes for its ability to hurt my head. Scientists have now successfully stored and retrieved a squeezed vacuum. Now, a squeezed vacuum is one that would have certain effects on light moving through it, if there was light. So, they managed to store this vacuum, and then retrieve it and pass light though it to show it still had this property. So, they

1. made a special kind of nothing
2. stored it
3. got it back again; and
4. proved it was the same special kind of nothing.

Before I read this article, I didn't even know you could squeeze a vacuum, never mind store the results.

Comments

[labyrinthman.livejournal.com]

*reads*

*reads again*

Ow. My brainmeats.

[ims.livejournal.com]

One could get the impression that the fabric of the universe is made out of rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.

[swestrup]

Indeed!

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

Last time I looked, it was five-dimensional. I can have a lot of doubt about that.

Too many details in http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9805018v1, found from http://astro.uwaterloo.ca/~wesson/
That ~wesson has a neat rotating 5D cube, by the way.

Brief summary: spacetime five-dimensional explains too many things to be considered silly. And rolling the extra dimension up really small doesn't seem to help much.

My favourite version, on aesthetic grounds, is for time to be two-dimensional.

[bob-eldritch.livejournal.com]

Right, so maybe the vacuum has just got squeezed into the heads of physicists with nothing on else on their minds but uncertainty.

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

Remember nudged electrons?