Posted on 10/30/2012 1:22:44 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Its not only possible to get light to tie itself in knots: given the right conditions, it will do so spontaneously, according to a paper published last week in Nature.
El Reg has no possible hope of fully understanding this paper (published in full, an emerging trend we welcome), but one really interesting idea is right there in the abstract:
We anticipate similar spontaneous knot topology to be a universal feature of waves whose phase front is twisted and nonlinearly modulated, including superfluids and trapped matter waves. [Emphasis added]
In other words, this research has the potential to be replicated not only to create knotted waves of light, but of waves in more tangible stuff.
The superposition Spirograph: different modes of
the knotted soliton. Source: Nature
Knotted light is already feature of research into things like optical tweezers and quantum computing. However, according to ANU researcher Dr Anton Desyatnikov, previous demonstrations have been painstakingly hand-made using carefully-engineered lasers.
[W]hat weve been working on are models in which the knots spontaneously form on their own, he said. Apart from their curiosity value, whats really interesting and useful about these knots of darkness is that they show you what the power flow is doing.
Our models suggest that you have to get the key parameters of the light in a certain range before you can easily tie the light in knots but once you do, the knots are virtually guaranteed
we cant predict exactly where they will form. Just that under these specific circumstances the optical vortices will spontaneously nucleate and tie themselves into little knots. ®
Those knotted hunks of star light spilling through those molecules would create energy flow patterns that would selectively filter out specific atoms adrift in the stream of water for inclusion in the matrix of the double-helix molecular forms.
So, thanks ~
“I should have read that book by that wheelchair guy” Homer Simpson
Bookmarked...
We did NOT cover this in culinary school.
Lissajous curves, yes. But this doesn't seem bounded by a rectangle. And the whole knotted light thing... Over my pay-grade.
/johnny
You beat me to it....
Sheldon!
kinda sorta links to that stuff about the deep, light, living water ~ a coded and embedded document explaining it all perhaps ~ what a thing to intuit.
I read the article until it took a non-linear track and tied itself into knots and my eyes defocused.
farts are funny
God’s power is infinite...I doubt we ever fully figure out how the universe if put together fully...think about it...we have not yet found the smallest particle nor do we know with certainty the whole of our reality...all physical is finite I am sure, but the conceptual is not...there is your proof for God...
Bothers me somebody could finally put this down on paper so it is so clear and obvious ~ even intuitively obvious ~ it explains the self-assembly method for light to create energy gradients on a small scale that could literally turn an atom ~ maybe even just an electron, or a proton ~
This is some break through stuff.
LOL.
over my head but it sounds important
lol
For my own purposes, I sometimes "expand" your expression to "L,W,H, T" or "X,Y,Z, T"...
Would you agree that a photon is composed of a smidgeon of space, a snatch of time, and energy? ... I would express that as point (spatial component of a thing), a moment (temporal component of a thing) and energy.
Due to the nature of the photon which is limited to a linear/present continuum, the moving thing manifests a wave nature in the volume(spatial)/future(temporal) Universe, kind of like a photon casts a 'shadow' upon the '4D universe' because it is existing in motion in one of the expression states of dimension space and or dimension time.
Apply that notion of 'casting a shadow' upon our '4D' to the effect of 'something' casting its shadow manifesting 'gravity' in our '4D'. What might be the 'thing' causing this shadow? ... Perhaps, since all things have temporal component to it at the most fundamental level, perhaps it is the 'massing/collection' of temporal 'grains' (or moments in my cosmology) which generates a temporal effect we interpret as mass curving spacetime.
I'm glad to see this, dear brother in Christ. I was just about to write the same thing, at least WRT superscript numbers. Where they are used in mathematics, they are generally understood to signify a raising of a power.
MHGinTN's highly interesting question:
Would a designation of S3T1 be a useful expression, so that S2T2 would also be a useful expression?Question for my dear brother in Christ MHG: Did you intend to say "S2T2" here, "or S3T2?" I thought perhaps the former may be a typo. The latter to me suggests a "volumetric" extension of "ordinary" spacetime i.e., S3T1, expanding to S3T2.
At the same time, TXinMA seems "also" to be correct: Subscripts denote quantity in this case, 3 of space, and 1 (0r 2!) of time.
Thank you so very much, dear MHG, for your fascinating idea!
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