How Scientists Stopped Light

Scientists have stopped light and trapped it in a crystal for a full minute. Show offs. Anthony here for DNews and look, I set out some candy and I trapped a SourceFed. Hello Lady SourceFed. I'm Leigh Newton. Or just like Leigh. Lady SourceFed everybody. Anyway, light thinks it's pretty impressive. It gets to be a particle and wave at the same time and it travels at the speed of around 300,000 meters per second, which means it can get to the moon and back 20 times in a single minute. Until we trap it in a crystal for that minute. Zod style. Who's impressive now, light? A German team from the University of Darmstadt stopped particles of light for a full minute using crystals and lasers, which is the most 80s sci-fi thing I think I've ever heard of. So you've got an opaque crystal and its atoms are all vibrating around like they do. And at any time, those atoms could be in a couple of different states and the team fired lasers into the crystal to make those atoms exist in a quantum superposition. Which is the worst James Bond movie. Which is a mix of those two states. In that superposition, the opaque crystal became transparent to certain kinds of light. So they fired a second laser into the now transparent crystal and it passed through. And then they shut off the first laser and whoops, crystal is opaque again and the particles of light from the second beam are trapped in the crystal. Now this isn't the first time that we've put light in its place either. A previous experiment by a German team two years ago used super cold atoms to stop light for a couple seconds. Why do this? Basically so the other scientists fear and respect you. But also if we trap light, we can use it to store and retrieve data. And that's a big deal because currently computers store data as a 1 or a 0 and they process that data one bit at a time. Because light can exist in different states at once, we could store data in a 1 or a 0 both at once. Meaning computers could crunch data much faster and work on multiple problems at the same time. It's called quantum computing and if we can make it work cheaply and reliably, we'll be sending and receiving incredibly secure data and processing it at speeds completely unreachable by today's computers. Sexy, secure snapchats at the speed of light everybody. That's all I can think to use it for. I know. It's all we can ever do. I can't think of anything useful. So many puppy pictures. All at once. Secure puppy pictures. Oh, secure puppy safe and secure puppy pictures. Now you guys might be wondering, hey, what's Lee Newton doing here? I don't know. Why am I here? What are you here for, Lee Newton? I just followed the handbasket I was in. Lee is here for the next few days and Laci Green is over at SourceFed. Lee, where's the SourceFed? It's at youtube.com slash SourceFed. Go say hi to Laci. There you go. And subscribe here for more DNews.