Crystals are the Future

No seriously, they are, especially these piezoelectric kinds. I clipped some things from this article just to keep us abreast.

LA crystals turn cars into energy source
July 2017, BBC News

"Piezoelectricity is not new technology - one of the most common applications is electric cigarette lighters which use piezoelectric crystals to create a flame. The electric lighters for barbecues use the same technology.

"Piezoelectric crystals generate an electrical charge when compressed and scientists estimate that if they were positioned on a 10-mile stretch of highway they could generate enough electricity to power the city of Burbank, which has a population of more than 100,000.

"Since 2009, all the displays at the East Japan Railway Company's Tokyo station have been powered by people walking on floor tiles that utilise piezoelectricity.

"And start-up PaveGen has put similar technology beneath the floor of a football pitch in one of Rio de Janeiro's most notorious favelas to offer night-time floodlights powered by footsteps. It means children can play at night rather than hang out in gangs."

image source
Karl Deckart, Salt Crystals 10x magnification, 1996 Nikon Photomicrography Competition
link

Meta-Atoms and Light-Bits

120-cell_Carlos Sequin

This is about freezing light, mostly so it can be used as memory in photonic computing, which is one of the places we are going with the future of computing, that is, beyond circuits for electric information. The following two articles are just about the ubiquity of quantum mechanical manipulation in increasingly 'normal' circumstances.

[The Rise of Photonics]

Device can theoretically trap a light 'bit' for an infinite amount of time

phys.org, Nov 2015

To overcome light's penchant for escaping, Lannebère and Silveirinha utilized an idea proposed by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner in 1929, and later extended by others, which has led to the discovery that transparent structures with tailored geometries can perfectly confine light by scattering it in a very specific way.

Lannebère and Silveirinha showed that this strategy for confining light can be achieved by shining light on a spherical "meta-atom," so-named because it allows light to have only a specific quantized energy value (creating a light "bit"), similar to how an atom allows electrons to occupy only certain quantized energy levels.

Quantum entanglement achieved at room temperature in semiconductor wafers
phys.org, Nov 2015
[Room temperature, whatever.]

Physicists mimic quantum entanglement with laser pointer to double data speeds
phys.org, Oct 2015
"While there's no 'spooky action at a distance,' it's amazing that quantum entanglement aspects can be mimicked by something that simple."

The Subtleties of Energy Input Effectiveness

Not just any input of energy will lead to a system to organize itself. It must come in a form that is useful, and at a rate that is not too fast or too slow. If I put my computer in the oven, I give it a lot of energy, but only to disorganize it. Instead, the computer requires a steady electric current in a particular range of voltages, just as the sun sends light at the right frequency for stimulating organic chemical reactions. Also, the heat/energy must be able to leave, as the biosphere regulates the Earth’s heat loss to the cold of space… (p153)

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford