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"I'm a farm boy. It's very interesting; you can detect self-starting characteristics in this society and they are strongest among people who have had some kind of rural upbringing and a very impressionable stage."
- Frank Herbert
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| Slow Glass Rod | ||
| A transparent glass rod that makes light travel so slowly that it can trap light within its depths. |
You've heard of burning bugs with sunlight concentrated with a magnifying glass? That's for sissies who can't figure out a different way to concentrate sunlight - by slowing it down.
| He held a contraption made of a glass rod and assorted wires. Methuen sighted along his glass rod and pressed a button. A pop... and a flash!
"By applying the right e.m.f. to pure crown glass, its possible to raise its index of refraction to a remarkable degree. The result is that the light striking the glass is so slowed up that it takes weeks to pass through it in the ordinary manner. The light that is thus trapped can be released by making a small spark near the glass. "I can shoot an hour's accumulated light energy out the front end of the rod in a very small fraction of a second. |
| Technovelgy from The Exhalted,
by L. Sprague de Camp. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1940 Additional resources -
|
Science fans will recognize one of the main properties of Bose-Einstein condensates, which can actually trap light waves, or slow them down to an inch a minute. Read a bit more about Bose-Einstein condensates; also, read about a modern experiment in which light is captured in a crystal.
Science fiction fans may recall the scenedows from Bob Shaw's 1968 story Light of Other Days. Probably the earliest references to the idea occurred in The Mirror That Remembered" (1932) by Christopher Blayre.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Exhalted
More Ideas
and Technology by L. Sprague de Camp
Tech news articles related to The Exhalted
Tech news articles related to works by L. Sprague de Camp
Slow Glass Rod-related
news articles:
- Slow Light Will Speed Communications
- Light-Trapping Nanodoughnut Like Slow Glass
- New Material Absorbs and Stores Solar Energy
| GNoME AI From DeepMind Invents Millions Of New Materials |
| Omniphobic Liquid-like Surfaces And de Camp's Telelubricator (1940) |
| MXenes - Atomic-Thin Metal Sheets Now Easier To Make |
| Do We Still Need Orbiting Factories? |
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
