Quote of the Day
We actually made light into a solid. That’s pretty awesome.
Dimitris Trypogeorgos
March 5, 2025
Light has been transformed into a ‘supersolid’ for the first time
I took physics in high school. I took two semesters of conventional physics and one semester of “modern” (quantum, relativity, etc.) physics in college. I learned about superfluids. But this is the first I have heard of supersolids.
It turns out they were not actually proven to exist until 2017. So, it is understandable that they were not taught in my classes many years before that.
And making light into anything other than its native photons or electromagnetic waves is beyond my comprehension. Just photons interacting with single/double slits and EM waves which have zero mass yet have momentum is wild enough.
Light into a solid? That just doesn’t compute.
First step to Star Trek-style Replicators and Holodecks.
I like living in the future.
“The true nature of time has eluded physicists for centuries”
Oh, BS. Einstein nailed it long ago. To paraphrase:
Time is just nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.
BTW: Time travel is easy. we do it all the time. Ten seconds from now I’ll have traveled in time by ten seconds.
It’s when you want to travel in reverse that things get a little tricky.
Exactamundo, to quote the great philosopher, Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarella.
As we learned in August 1945, a lot of energy comes out of matter. How much energy has to go into light to make it something solid, whether mere mortal solid or a Supersolid, with powers far beyond mortal solids.
What can they do with Supersolid? What kind of job is there for Supersolid?
I think I need to find a better article, because what they’re doing sure sounds like they’re making a pumped, propagating evanescent wave over a circular diffraction grating (or supercooled crystal acting as such).
Or perhaps a near-field radiation pattern from a complex antenna, radiating at optical frequencies, is a better way to describe it.
And it can’t be that simple, can it? I must be missing something.
Is this solid light about 3 feet long and saber shaped yet?
More garbage reporting on garbage “Science”. They created a wave pattern. An interesting pattern, but nothing more. Remember, folks, “quasi-” means it’s not real.
It’s telling that the article was pushing other articles about reverse time travel. Piled Higher and Deeper.
A wave pattern doesn’t sound like a new type of solid to me.
Are we a mere fifty years from actually creating a supersolid? Just as we’re only ten years from actually creating controlled fusion and twelve years from catastrophic anthropogenic global warming?
Men and women will understand each other before any of those things happen.
Interesting accomplishment. It will be interesting to see what if any useful processe come from this. Things in the quantum realm don’t usually translate well into our world….
Yeah, I’m going to have to take a highly skeptical stance on this one two, especially in this “age of high bullshit”, that was predictable from government funding of “science”.
So, we all know that photons have “no rest mass”, so this solid, which would be made of “stationary” “particles”, somehow still “moving” at the speed of light (they cannot decelerate, for the same reason they cannot accelerate), would have exactly no mass. Does it have volume?
As always, the truth will be found in the details, which when you understand them, will almost certainly have a clearly simpler explanation.