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Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

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Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#141
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd have to know the (physical) reading mechanism (plus encoding) to read the README.txt itself.

Well encoding is not an issue. Any civilisation who have the physical means to read the disc will be able to figure out the encoding fairly simply.

It isn't that simple, many lost languages have only been restored because of the dual language books.

Similarly, I think what matters here is the higher-order redundancy. A single encoding that can be lost, is not straightforward to figure out, and holds the clue to a massive storage, isn't the most future proof decision; it's a single point of failure.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#142
post #139

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up ("phony", as you put it)! Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted what decay would look like on an Arrhenius plot. They both computed estimates and measured to confirm: the measurements are quite accurate.…

I don't think they meant it was fraud, just that it's sensationalist drivel. It's choosing a way to interpret results for the sake of sounding impressive, rather than improving understanding.

Choosing a temperature in order to say "this will last as long as the universe's current age", or finding ways to count extra dimensions is the behaviour of marketeers, not academics.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#143
post #45

Seems a bit of a waste to dedicate an entire 360TB disc to a single text document like a bible, which is probably just a few KBs... /s More seriously, they don't talk about reading capabilities (retrieval speed etc). And what if it gets scratched? What is the error tolerance? At that density, a single speck of dust could have dramatic implications... I hope this reaches industrial viability, because we desperately ne…

Just to follow up, here's a list of the problems I know about in getting 3D (or 5D) storage to market.

* Materials. You need something that can be manipulated or deformed at reasonable energy levels into two or more stable states to store data, then maintain that state for a useful lifetime without power. That's already a bit of a Goldilocks act, but it must also be non-reactive, not too brittle, not too expensive, etc.

* Media manufacture. Recording even a single layer at these feature sizes is a non-trivial challenge. As layers increase, yield drops exponentially - even before you consider how the layers interact.

* Read/write mechanisms. Focusing on a single layer on a moving medium, with nothing in the way, is also a challenge. Put other data-bearing layers in the way and it becomes much more difficult. Also, the "blast radius" for a single focus/alignment error becomes much larger, so you're going to need some serious error correction over and above what already exists for 2D.

* Transfer speeds. These are already problematic even at 10TB. 360TB without a corresponding increase in transfer speeds would be a nightmare.

A prototype involving a novel set of materials and/or mechanisms working once under ideal conditions is great. Science advances. Kudos for that. But that's only solving about one fifth of the problems that need to be solved to produce something of actual value in the market. You see a similar thing with battery technology. Everyone knows we need better batteries. There are always several companies claiming to have found the next breakthrough Almost invariably the new wonder material turns out to be a poor fit for real-world scale, economics, or conditions. Obviously we should keep trying, and keep learning, but nobody should get their hopes up too much too early.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#144

Does anyone know a resource which explains the theoretical limit for retrievable, durable, information storage? I would assume the most dense medium possible would be a collection of neutrons, since neutron stars are the most dense object other than a black hole, but retrieving information from them doesn’t seem feasible.

"'Dragon's Egg' is a 1980 hard science fiction novel by Robert L. Forward. In the story, Dragon's Egg is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures the size of a sesame seed who live, think, and develop a million times faster than humans. Most of the novel, from May to June 2050, chronicles the cheela civilization beginning with its discovery o…

I absolutely loved this book. However, isn't it curious that the humans arrive just as the cheela are reaching the level of technology needed to communicate? In terms of human time, they could have come a year earlier, or a year later.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#145
post #142
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up ("phony", as you put it)! Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted what decay would look like on an Arrhenius plot. They both computed estimates and measured to confirm: the measurements are quite accurate.…

I don't think they meant it was fraud, just that it's sensationalist drivel. It's choosing a way to interpret results for the sake of sounding impressive, rather than improving understanding. Choosing a temperature in order to say "this will last as long as the universe's current age", or finding ways to count extra dimensions is the behaviour of marketeers, not academics.

And yet, I pulled those claims out of the paper, which I linked. Are you suggesting Peter G. Kazansky, a research professor with over two decades of experience in optics, does not count as an academic? Or are you saying the paper doesn't make those claims? Or are you saying the paper also isn't a real academic paper and just marketeer noise?

(I'm not quoting the other authors, who are of course also distinguished scholars :-))

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#146

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

> I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics.

It's completely common for scientists to use more than 3D, since D does not have to mean spatial dimensions. Relativity is 4D (space+time), M-Theory is 11 or 26 or 10 depending on context.

Even classical mechanics is formulated as 6D (3 position, 3 momentum). This leads to Hamiltonians and Lagrangians, cornerstones of modern physics, upon which all modern physics is based.

As to light, it's east to find multiple dimensions to store light patterns: 3D space, 1 D polarization, 1D frequency, and now we have 5 independent dimensions in which to store data.

5D, if they use 5 independent degrees of freedom to store data, does not undermine the science - it makes it precise.

The title of the paper is "5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Writing in Glass" and is an invited paper at a top conference in their field. I suspect the '5D' being in the title means it is not marketing hype but actual physics.

EDIT: Here [1] is the paper. They do use 5 degrees of freedom as I expected: 3 position, slow-axis orientation, and retardance. So it most certainly is 5D storage.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297892219_Eternal_5...

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#147

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

Then you know of no sane scientist or engineer, at least any that might have a passing familiarity to n-dimensional data or basic mathematical concepts.

Dimensions are the conventional term when talking about aspects of data. It doesn't just have to be spatial data, although that's the common usage of dimensions.

If you're using the 3d position with two additional dimensions of size and rotation of the object at that position, you're literally processing 5 measurable dimensions of input in order to extract data.

It's not like they're claiming to record data in time and a wibbly wobbly 5th dimension. It's a literal mathematical dimension describing the properties of the recording medium and method.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#148
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that people don't read the titles of press releases with pre-conceived notions of what a degree of freedom is, so it's not as useful for making clickbait.

5D has been a term of art for years, and was not made up by this article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

I don't know the optical storage space one way or another, so I was curious to learn more. As far as I can tell, that Wikipedia page you've linked to is solely about the same work by the same researchers as the article. Am I overlooking something? Has there been work by others using the same term? Or is the idea that the process of becoming a Wikipedia title is what makes it a term of art?

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#149
post #33

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

Heads is a low resolution dimension, so CHS should probably be more like 2.5D. Magnetic orientation is just binary, so not a dimension. The 5D in the article is kind of fishy, but in this case size and orientation are more of a low resolution dimension like multi-level cells in a flash drive.

If it's a property of an object that defines the object, it's a dimension. Spatial location gives us 3 dimensions, rotation and size give us 2 more. The dimensions don't all have to use the same units.
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