161–170 of 201 posts
Everyone talking about magenta and brown, but you can see an illusory color right now even without lasers! https://dynomight.net/colors/ behold, some kind of hyper-turquoise
FYI if you get ocular/retinal migraines like me then the exercise in this article might be a bad idea.
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> what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception It's worth noting that is true of virtually everything we know. >>This is a very simple sentence. relationships between the different concepts or colors will be analogous amongst most people - so a common understanding within the differences is possible. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that there are so many data points in color…
At the same time, there's some commonality for what words mean in different contexts. For example, even though we all have our own experiences with the concept of "dog", there's a common core where we have enough of an understanding what other people refer to as "dog" to allow discussing the concept. Likewise, for most people, dog is more similar to cat than to house. Imagine if we could build a machine that reads a…
For all I know you don't just have a completely different experience of red, but a complete different experience of geometry and spacetime.
Your subjective experience of vision could be a mirror of my own. But we'd both still associate "right" with the same half of the body.
You might not "feel" curves and lines the same way.
As long as everyone's mappings and weights are identical, the qualia themselves could be anything.
We assume the qualia would at least be recognisable, and they can't be too different because there has to be a common core of experience categories, with recognisably consistent relationships.
But beyond that - anything works.
This isn't a hypothetical because once you get into politics and ethics, the consistent relationships disappear. There are huge differences between individuals, and this causes a lot of problems.
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I mean I've always thought the kinetic experience of vinyl was the point: my childhood memory is the excitement and anticipation of carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches that meant it was about to start. The whole physical enterprise has a narrative and anticipation to it.
Not to mention the wider context of starting off by opening a beautifully designed record sleeve, and the chances people choosing to listening to vinyl are doing so on a beautifully engineered soundsystem that cost as much as a car when it was released 50 years ago, or a turntable setup that's designed for them to interact with.
This is consumer narcissism. It's the driver behind Veblen signalling - the principle that a combination of collecting physical objects. nostalgia, and the elevated taste and disposable wealth required to create a unique shrine to the superior self.
Buying houses, watches, cars, vinyl, yachts, jets, and politicians are all the same syndrome.
Some people take it further than others.
Is there a single person here interested in photonic computing that wants to explain to the class if there's any "there" there?
You need to understand quantum physics[3,2]. For example, photonic computing, photonic logic does not have a switch equivalent as semiconducting (CMOS transistor) or superconducting (Josephson Junction JJ) but we have a photonic Mach Zener interferometer (MZI) and a photon detector.
Photonics and superconducting electronics is always going to be much larger in size (and therefore more expensive) than semiconductors build from few atoms.
In quantum physics photonics we have advantages like quantum impedance, you can replace wires with photon transmitters and photodetectors and thus switch with only a few photons instead of large numbers of electrons.
With photonics you can have billions of cheap low power data channels instead of high power wire bundles. But MZI as JJ will probably always be a few orders of magnitude larger than transistors so switching is not going to be better, but interferometry is.
Shorter answer still: just low power communications and information processing yes, computing no.
Bulk CMOS manufacturing is still cheaper than all the alternatives we have discovered or invented, until we learn to manufacture atom by atom or compute with single photons or electrons (also dependent on molecule by molecule self-assembly), we will stay with CMOS and Moore's law.
Just listen to David B. Millers[1] lectures [2], his lectures are a shortcut to reading all his papers[2] that explain it all, especially [3].
Email me, I'll give you a private lecture.
Your question's anwer is/was a summary of our whole lives research [4]:
[1] https://appliedphysics.stanford.edu/profile/35
[2] https://www.youtube.com/@davidmillerscience
[3] Attojoule Optoelectronics for Low-Energy Information Processing and Communication https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7805240
[4] Wafer Scale Integration Free Space Optics Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI
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Nope, it's 1/2 - 2/3 the speed of light depending on the metals used.
You're both wrong. It's true that the first whisper of movement travels at the speed of light, but the time until the flow stabilizes (which you WILL need to wait for in electrical chips) is actually slower than the "speed of electricity". Oh and also: currently the idea behind on-chip lasers is interconnects that don't have this limitation. For example, PCIE is looking to build optical interconnects, which will do t…
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If you pay attention to cats, you figure out they are fuzzy little “difference engines.” They seem to be hyper-tuned to things that change. For example, if I move a small item in the corner of my room, the next time the cat walks in, he’ll go straight to it, and sniff around. I have a feeling that cat’s eyes have some kind of “movement sensors,” built in. Maybe things that move look red, and most of the background lo…
Even human eyes have some areas, outside the fovea centralis, that are very sensitive to motion even in low light. In the dark you will see motion out of the corner of your eye but you will only see pitch black if you stare in that direction. The other part you mention is more interesting, I noticed it too. That must be a mechanism in the brain rather than the eye. It’s like the cat keeps a “snapshot” of that place t…
> That must be a mechanism in the brain rather than the eye
Check out "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" [1] by Jeff Hawkins [2], of PalmPilot fame. This theory postulates, in part, and with evidence, that brains are continuously comparing sensory input and movement context with learned models. I found the book to be mind-blowing, so to speak ...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...
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FYI if you get ocular/retinal migraines like me then the exercise in this article might be a bad idea.
I get migraines and didn't have any problem. Bring unable to focus is more of a symptom or early warning rather than a trigger, at least for me. I'm not sure what the trigger is, maybe being dehydrated or something I ate.
I'm excited for new displays where instead of RGB primaries that can only show a triangular subset of possible colours, we have dynamic primaries that can combine to show almost any colour.
That sounds cool but how do you encode the image data?
No clue how you'd film in this format but the CGI and video games would be epic.
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Immediately: * You can pack many more different colors into fiber optic communication lines. Every color carries a few tens of GHz in modulation, but the carrier light is in hundreds of THz; there's a ton of bandwidth not used between readily available colors. * You can likely do interesting molecular chemistry by precisely adjusting laser light to the energy levels of particular bonds / electrons. * Maybe you can pr…
Fiber has fairly narrow windows in which it is as transparent as it needs to be to go long distance. We're already pretty good at filling these windows with conventional semiconductor lasers. What this is actually interesting for is being able to access arbitrary atomic transitions, many of which are outside the range of conventional semiconductors (too short, usually - there's a big hole between green and red for se…
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Would you care to explain how the NICT guys achieved 402Tb/s through a single (50km long!) fiber back in 2024 then? It seems like another factor of two would easily be in reach if they could extend their setup into the visible.
Fibers are not transparent enough in visible. I found about 10dB/km (to be compared with 0.2 dB/km around 1550nm) [0]. This means that after every km the light intensity is divided by 10, which is completely impractical for telecommunications. [0] https://media.thorlabs.com/globalassets/family-pages/shareda...