--| The Corpse of Light? |--- 


http://partners.nytimes.com/2001/01/18/science/18LIGH.html

Scientists Bring Light to Full Stop, Hold It, Then Send It on Its Way
By JAMES GLANZ - January 18, 2001

Researchers say they have slowed light to a dead stop, stored it and then
released it as if it were an ordinary material particle...

Two independent teams of physicists have achieved the result, one led by
Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard University and the Rowland Institute
for Science in Cambridge, Mass., and the other by Dr. Ronald L. Walsworth
and Dr. Mikhail D. Lukin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, also in Cambridge...

Using a distantly related but much more powerful effect, the
Walsworth-Lukin team first slowed and then stopped the light in a medium
that consisted of specially prepared containers of gas... "Essentially,
the light becomes stuck in the medium, and it can't get out until the
experimenters say so," said Dr. Seth Lloyd...

He said the work's biggest impact could come in futuristic technologies
called quantum computing and quantum communication. Both concepts rely
heavily on the ability of light to carry so-called quantum information,
involving particles that can exist in many places or states at once.

Quantum computers could crank through certain operations vastly faster
than existing machines... For both these systems, light is needed to form
large networks of computers. But those connections are difficult without
temporary storage of light, a problem that the new work could help solve.

A paper by Dr. Walsworth, Dr. Lukin and three collaborators Ñ Dr. David
Phillips, Annet Fleischhauer and Dr. Alois Mair, all at Harvard-
Smithsonian Ñ is scheduled to appear in the Jan. 29 issue of Physical
Review Letters.

"The light is actually brought to a stop and stored completely in the
atoms," Dr. Harris said. "There's no other way to do that. It's been done
Ñ done very convincingly, and beautifully."

[Full article cited below] 


--| Steiner on Electricity and Light |--- 

If we were to look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that men
built their dwelling places by methods very different from those used in
modern life. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things.
Even when building palaces they summoned nature to their aid by utilizing
plants interlaced with branches of trees and so on, Whereas today men must
build with broken fragments. All the culture of the external world is
contrived with the aid of products of fragmentation. And in the course of
the coming years you will realise even more clearly how much in our
civilised life is the outcome of destruction.

Light itself is being destroyed in this post-Atlantean age of the Earth's
existence, which until the time of Atlantis was a progressive process.
Since then it has been a process of decay.* WHAT IS LIGHT? LIGHT DECAYS
AND THE DECAYING LIGHT IS ELECTRICITY. WHAT WE KNOW AS ELECTRICITY IS
LIGHT THAT IS BEING DESTROYED IN MATTER. AND THE CHEMICAL FORCE THAT
UNDERGOES A TRANSFORMATION IN THE PROCESS OF EARTH EVOLUTION IS MAGNETISM.
YET A THIRD FORCE WILL BECOME ACTIVE AND IF ELECTRICITY SEEMS TO WORK
WONDERS TODAY, THIS THIRD FORCE WILL AFFECT CIVILISATION IN A STILL MORE
MIRACULOUS WAY. THE MORE OF THIS FORCE WE EMPLOY, THE FASTER THE EARTH
WILL TEND TO BECOME A CORPSE AND ITS SPIRITUAL PART PREPARE FOR THE
JUPITER EMBODIMENT. Forces have to be applied for the purpose of
destruction, in order that man may become free of the Earth and that the
Earth's body may fall away. As long as the earth was involved in
progressive evolution, no such destruction took place, for the great
achievements of electricity can only serve a decaying Earth. Strange as
this sounds, it must gradually become known. By understanding the process
of evolution we shall learn to assess our culture at its true value. We
shall also learn that it is necessary for the Earth to be destroyed, for
otherwise the spiritual could not become free.

* Also Ref: Strader Engines , and
a lecture which mentions matter as 'condensed light' in the compilation
*From Elephants to Einstein* - ed.

~

Question: What is the relation of chemical forces and substances to the
spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances which can combine
with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is
projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan Ñ the realm
of the Harmony of the Spheres. In the combination of two substances
according to their atomic weights, we have a reflection of two tones of
the Harmony of the Spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances
in the physical world is like a reflection from the realm of the Harmony
of the Spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are an expression of the
numerical ratios of the Harmony of the Spheres, which has become dumb and
silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able to
etherealise material substance and to perceive the atomic numbers the
inner formative principle thereof, he would be hearing the Harmony of the
Spheres [arranged in 'octaves'].

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan and the
Higher Devachan. If the body is thrust down lower even than the physical
world, it comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the
lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The
evil astral world is the province of Lucifer, the evil Lower Devachan the
province of Ahriman, and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the
Asuras. When chemical action is driven down beneath the physical plane Ñ
into the evil Devachanic world Ñ magnetism arises. When light is thrust
down into the sub-material Ñ that is to say, a stage deeper than the
material world Ñ electricity arises. If what lives in the Harmony of the
Spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an
even more terrible force Ñ which it will not be possible to keep hidden
very much longer Ñ is generated. It can only be hoped that when this force
comes to be known Ñ a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger
than the most violent electrical discharge Ñ it can only be hoped that
before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humankind, men
will no longer have anything un-moral left in them. 


Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there
compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality too must be ascribed to
light; light is itself at every point in space. Warmth will expand in the
three dimensions of space. In light there is a fourth; it is of fourfold
extension Ñ it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the Earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the Moon-evolution we have our present moon which
circles around the Earth. Similarly there will be a residue of the Earth
which will circle around Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually
dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any
residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure Warmth, then it will
become Light and then pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left
behind by the Earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man
must not accompany the Earth, for he would thereby be exposed to dreadful
torments. But there are Beings who accompany this corpse, since they
themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

Reflected as sub-physical world:

Astral World            the province of Lucifer
Lower Devachan          the province of Ahriman
Higher Devachan         the province of the Asuras

-- 

Reference:

Rudolf Steiner, *The Etherisation of the Blood*,
Basle, October 1, 1911, GA 130.
URL: http://wn.elib.com/Steiner/Lectures/EthBld_index.html 

---


http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns227439
 
A Clear Winner

Magnets and microchips combine in a transparent supermaterial


...Japanese scientists are working on a revolutionary new semiconductor
that might one day be turned into just this kind of [transparent crystal
computer storage crystal]...

Computer displays made of the material will have all the image processing
and memory circuits invisibly buried in the screen itself, making them
cheaper and less power hungry than today's displays.

A team led by Yuji Matsumoto of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Titech)
in Yokohama were looking for a material that was both a semiconductor and
a permanent magnet, or "ferromagnet". They succeeded--and were amazed to
find that the material is transparent as well.

Best of all, the new material works at room temperature. "This is a very
important step," says Hideo Ohno, a semiconductor physicist at Tohoku
University in Sendai. "If it didn't work at room temperature it would be
no good for use in everyday applications." Ohno and his colleagues have
created a ferromagnetic semiconductor of their own by mixing manganese
into gallium arsenide. But their material is opaque, and only works at a
frigid 110 kelvin.

To produce magnetic semiconductors that can stand the heat, the Titech
team with colleagues from the National Institute for Research in Inorganic
Materials in Tsukuba turned to a technique called combinatorial chemistry.
They carried out thousands of tiny chemical reactions simultaneously in a
vacuum, each with slightly different ingredients. They then screened the
products of the different reactions en masse to see which had the best
properties.

Matsumoto and his colleagues will soon report in Science that one of the
reactions produced a thin film of titanium dioxide doped with just under 8
per cent cobalt. This transparent material turned out to be both
semiconducting and permanently magnetic at room temperature. Using
magnetic microscopy the researchers found areas in the material where
electron spins line up spontaneously to produce magnetism.

The Titech researchers say they don't know why the cobalt has this effect.
"We need to accumulate more data," says team member Hideomi Koinuma.

Ohno says the discovery is important in the emerging field of
"spintronics", in which engineers hope to harness both the charge-carrying
aspects of electrons and their spin, which is the root of magnetism.
Because the material is magnetic parts of it could store data in much the
same way as a computer hard drive. And as a semiconductor, other parts
could process information like the transistors in a microchip.

Ohno says the material will most likely be turned into flat-panel displays
which have all their processing and storage circuits invisibly built-in.
"Currently, transistors in laptop displays absorb a quarter of the
brightness of the backlight. Transparent transistors could solve this." 

--- 










==| original article in full |===

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/18/science/18LIGH.html

Scientists Bring Light to Full Stop, Hold It, Then Send It on Its Way
By JAMES GLANZ - January 18, 2001


Researchers say they have slowed light to a dead stop, stored it and then
released it as if it were an ordinary material particle.

The achievement is a landmark feat that, by reining in nature's swiftest and
most ethereal form of energy for the first time, could help realize what are
now theoretical concepts for vastly increasing the speed of computers and
the security of communications.

Two independent teams of physicists have achieved the result, one led by Dr.
Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for
Science in Cambridge, Mass., and the other by Dr. Ronald L. Walsworth and
Dr. Mikhail D. Lukin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
also in Cambridge.

Light normally moves through space at 186,000 miles a second. Ordinary
transparent media like water, glass and crystal slow light slightly, an
effect that causes the bending of light rays that allows lenses to focus
images and prisms to produce spectra.

Using a distantly related but much more powerful effect, the Walsworth-Lukin
team first slowed and then stopped the light in a medium that consisted of
specially prepared containers of gas. In this medium, the light became
fainter and fainter as it slowed and then stopped. By flashing a second
light through the gas, the team could essentially revive the original beam.

The beam then left the chamber carrying nearly the same shape, intensity and
other properties it had when it entered. The experiments led by Dr. Hau
achieved similar results with closely related techniques.

"Essentially, the light becomes stuck in the medium, and it can't get out
until the experimenters say so," said Dr. Seth Lloyd, an associate professor
of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
is familiar with the work.

Dr. Lloyd added, "Who ever thought that you could make light stand still?"

He said the work's biggest impact could come in futuristic technologies
called quantum computing and quantum communication. Both concepts rely
heavily on the ability of light to carry so-called quantum information,
involving particles that can exist in many places or states at once.

Quantum computers could crank through certain operations vastly faster than
existing machines; quantum commmunications could never be eavesdropped upon.
For both these systems, light is needed to form large networks of computers.
But those connections are difficult without temporary storage of light, a
problem that the new work could help solve.

A paper by Dr. Walsworth, Dr. Lukin and three collaborators Ñ Dr. David
Phillips, Annet Fleischhauer and Dr. Alois Mair, all at Harvard- Smithsonian
Ñ is scheduled to appear in the Jan. 29 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Citing restrictions imposed by the journal Nature, where her report is to
appear, Dr. Hau refused to discuss her work in detail.

Two years ago, however, Nature published Dr. Hau's description of work in
which she slowed light to about 38 miles an hour in a system involving beams
of light shone through a chilled sodium gas.

Dr. Walsworth and Dr. Lukin mentioned Dr. Hau's new work in their paper,
saying she achieved her latest results using a similarly chilled gas. Dr.
Lukin cited her earlier work, which Dr. Hau produced in collaboration with
Dr. Stephen Harris of Stanford University, as the inspiration for the new
experiments.

--

Those experiments take the next step, stopping the light's propagation
completely.

"We've been able to hold it there and just let it go, and what comes out is
the same as what we sent in," Dr. Walsworth said. "So it's like a freeze
frame."

Dr. Walsworth, Dr. Lukin and their team slowed light in a gas form of
rubidium, an alkaline metal element.

The deceleration of the light in the rubidium differed in several ways from
how light slows through an ordinary lens. For one thing, the light dimmed as
it slowed through the rubidium.

Another change involved the behavior of atoms in the gas, which developed a
sort of impression of the slowing wave.

This impression, actually consisting of patterns in a property of the atoms
called their spin, was a kind of record of the light's passing and was
enough to allow the experimenters to revive or reconstitute the original
beam.

Both Dr. Hau's original experiments on slowing light, and the new ones on
stopping it, rely on a complex phenomenon in certain gases called
electromagnetically induced transparency, or E.I.T.

This property allows certain gases, like rubidium, that are normally opaque
to become transparent when specially treated.

For example, rubidium would normally absorb the dark red laser light used by
Dr. Walsworth and his colleagues, because rubidium atoms are easily excited
by the frequency of that light.

But by shining a second laser, with a slightly different frequency, through
the gas, the researchers rendered it transparent.

The reason is that the two lasers create the sort of "beat frequency" that
occurs when two tuning forks simultaneously sound slightly different notes.

The gas does not easily absorb that frequency, so it allows the light to
pass through it; that is, the gas becomes transparent.

But another property of the atoms, called their spin, is still sensitive to
the new frequency. Atoms do not actually spin but the property is a
quantum-mechanical effect analagous to a tiny bar magnet that can be twisted
by the light.

As the light passes through, it alters those spins, in effect flipping them.
Though the gas remains transparent, the interaction serves as a friction or
weight on the light, slowing it.

Using that technique, Dr. Hau and Dr. Harris in the earlier experiment
slowed light to a crawl. But they could not stop it, because the transparent
"window" in the gas became increasingly narrower, and more difficult to pass
through, as the light moved slower and slower.

In a recent theoretical advance, Dr. Lukin, with Dr. Suzanne Yelin of
Harvard-Smithsonian and Dr. Michael Fleischhauer of the University of
Kaiserslautern in Germany, discovered a way around this constraint.

They suggested waiting for the beam to enter the gas container, then
smoothly reducing the intensity of the second beam.

The three physicists calculated that this procedure would narrow the window,
slowing the first beam, but also "tune" the system so that the beam always
passes through.

The first beam, they theorized, should slow to an infinitesimally slow
speed, finally present only as an imprint on the spins, with no visible
light remaining. Turning the second beam back on, they speculated, should
reconstitute the first beam.

The new experiments bore those ideas out.

"The light is actually brought to a stop and stored completely in the
atoms," Dr. Harris said. "There's no other way to do that. It's been done Ñ
done very convincingly, and beautifully." 

---