Originally posted by framedragged
reply to post by Bedlam
Oh wow, that's clever. I think here's a good place to stop prodding, I've gotten plenty to ponder over today. Especially your comment about
Israel...
I'll never understand how so many posters here just glaze over your posts.
I'm intentionally obscure for some topics. (shrug)
Here's you a fiction. I recall sitting with some guys after watching this thing for the first time, and someone said something like "I wonder if my
children will grow up", and hey, what do you say to that? Of course, Gariac will tell you that's a stupid rumor, for sure it's not as cool as
taking yet MORE pictures of keep out signs on secure area fencing.
But let's think about, say, plasmonics. You can store photon states in plasmonic waves. Heck, I missed getting a patent on an application that did
that by about six months, dammit. Any of these "laser moving at only a few hundred feet per second" topics is an example.
(turns on wayback machine..) Ok, back when, and it was before 2004 but I'm not sure exactly when without looking, we went to a symposium that
included Lijun Wang as a speaker, there were a dozen of us intrepid gubmint contractor types scattered in the room trying to look all scholarly. The
topic concerned slowing a laser using plasmonic states in an anomalously dispersive medium (hint - metamaterial-like). It's not vastly different than
the trick you use to build time-conjugators but it was WAY more effective than we'd seen. So. Take a cylinder of medium type x that fits that bill,
say a meter long, with a propagation rate of 17 meters per second. Fire a laser into it so that you've got nearly 1/17 of a second of laser stored in
plasmonic excitation in this meter long tube.
Then turn off the excitation field that makes it go.
The laser energy stored in the tube will come barreling out near c. The wavelength will be...proportionally decreased. You can't get the tube excited
uniformly again for a bit, so you have - picture a gatling gun - a number of these things overlapping. It's like mechanical leverage. You put in
energy slowly for a while, then let it out. It's one hellacious pulse compressor.
You are a bit limited by the cesium gas, there's only so much plasmonic deformation you can get, so there's other solid materials that do this too.
Of course, given direct metric engineering, you can do it by just increasing the values for permeability and permittivity in a region, then loading
the region with your beam, then reversing or dropping the field that causes this, same effect as with plasmonics. Out comes several seconds of beam in
a nanosecond, Schwing!. An obvious side-effect of a region of slow C is that any light entering it would be blue-shifted from the POV of an outside
observer.
Good thing it's all just tales to entertain.