This was just announced so I haven't had time to look into it much, but from what I gather after scanning an article or two it seems that it works pretty much exactly like the Bose noise-cancelling headphones (and the hypothetical "anti-bark" device) I just talked about in a recent post. I may not have this correct but apparently it matches the frequencies of light and sets up a counter-wave that's exactly opposite in frequency. When the beam, or whatever it is, from the Laser hits light, it cancels it out just like two waves meeting head-on in the ocean when one is at peak and on is at the bottom of the trough. For an instant they meet and cancel one another and the surface of the water briefly becomes flat and still. If you could create waves that exactly matched the normal incoming waves in amplitude and rate and all, you could create perfectly calm seas. It's the same principle with the Laser, at least if I understand what I was reading.
I should have read more before I posted this but it's so wild I couldn't help it. I'm assuming it means any light including regular white light, instead of a single color, or frequency. White light is a mixture of all the colors (frequencies) at once, and unlike a normal Laser beam which is concentrated into a thin beam, normal white light is scattered all over the place. Please consult your Physics books for details, but a frequency can be considered a wave, and it can also be considered particles at the same time, so shining a white light is akin to shooting a shotgun, with the pellets (particles) going forward but flying all over the place. That a Laser, or anything else could cancel that out seems like magic. Maybe it is.
As I've said before, it's not a question of if technology is ahead of what we know, but how far it's ahead. To recap, we know that it's definitely ahead of what we know; otherwise we wouldn't be getting the new iPhone 25 and anything "new and improved." Over the last decade or so I've heard quite a few people weigh-in on this topic. Some people say that we're maybe a few years or a decade ahead. Interestingly the vast majority of people think it's around a half-century, which is no doubt surprising to most people. A handful of people think it's so far ahead of what we know that it's basically impossible to calculate, but on the order of centuries or even millennia. That's nuts, but who are we to say that isn't the case? We don't know. Most of us aren't scientists, but I doubt even most scientists have a clue. Information like that is guarded with lives, and everyone involved is strictly on a need-to-know basis, which means that they don't know a thing about the big picture; only the little chip or whatever part it is that will eventually go into the bigger thing.
Information is compartmentalized; just like the cubicles the workers sit in. By the way, if you read-up on the Manhattan Project, which was one of the best-kept secrets in all of history, you'll begin to understand how huge secrets were actually kept secret. Estimates vary, but without looking it up I'm pretty sure the number of people directly working on the Manhattan project was over 100,000, and maybe many more. That's a lot of people "keeping a secret," but really they never knew the secret to begin with, at least until they bombed Nagasaki or whatever and the employees found out about what they'd been working on (maybe) at the same time as John Q.Public.
It wasn't like they went in to apply for a job making 3" bolts eight hours a day, and the boss said "Okay, we're building a big-ass bomb here and we don't know exactly who or when yet, but we're going to bomb the fuck out of somebody, and that 3" bolt you'll be building holds the warhead on. But it's a SECRET, so don't tell anyone!" It wasn't like that at all, but that's basically what most people think when they say it'd be impossible to keep a secret from so very many people. They never knew in the first place. I doubt that out of all those people who built 3" bolts for "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" and everyone else involved, any more than about a dozen people knew the whole story. If you can get your head around that idea then you'll begin to understand that they can, and do, keep massive secrets from the public. Back in the day of the Manhattan Project, even though the people involved knew nothing, they were still told to say nothing about what they were doing. I guess they were instructed to say nothing about nothing. Well, redundancy is a good thing.
Almost twenty years ago my good buddy Tut started telling me things that sounded absolutely batshit-crazy, and at first I was like "Uh-huh, man," but I was grinning inside. But then I quickly remembered my lifelong policy of looking into "crazy shit" whether I believed it or not; just for the fun of imagining crazy scenarios if nothing else. Plus Tut was as sane as it gets. I know him well, and while we drank a bit back in the day, he never took anything stronger than a Lortab. He tried reefer maybe three times and didn't like it, and he never once took any psychedelics or any other drugs whatsoever. He'd never had any mental issues at all, even simple depression, so I began looking into some of the things he said, and guess what...I learned some SHIT. Heavy, heavy shit. Shit that could be corroborated by MANY different and unrelated sources over time, and when I wasn't even looking for verification. There's only so many times you can ignore perfectly good facts coming at you, simply because you don't THINK it's true.
When you figure in things like miniaturization, computer power doubling every so often and such, even if technology is only a few years ahead of what we know it'd probably be mind-boggling. A decade ahead? I doubt we'd recognize the place. Remember, it's an exponential deal. Fifty years ahead? Forget it. That'd be Science Fucking Fiction. I lean toward "I don't know 'cause I wasn't there," but I'm with the camp that thinks that certain technologies go way far back, especially when I look at some of the ancient structures and ponder how they were built by any means. As the son and former draftsman of an Architect I know a bit about construction and what it takes to build a big-ass thing. Those ancient structures don't fit into the category of "easily explainable."
If you watch these shows like Nascent Aliens on the History channel or YouTube docs or read articles about these massive structures with 100-ton blocks that we can't even lift today, or blocks that are "cut" (especially inward cuts) with so much precision, and repeated over and over to the point that it seems that the rock was actually vitrified, or melted, and cast in place like plaster, you have to wonder WTF. Stuff like that gets my attention. Interestingly the "H-blocks" found at Puma Punku are a mystery in themselves, again appearing to have been liquefied and cast in molds, and featuring such ultra-precise inward cuts that they say it would take hours with the finest cutting Lasers we have today just to make one block.
The kicker is that they formerly thought that they were all the same, but fairly recently they measured the blocks more closely and found that they were almost all slightly different. That's hard to believe. They were made to be assembled in a specific order, and I'm pretty sure they were able to run a computer program like CadCam or whatever and reconstruct a virtual image of at least part of the intended structure, but I could be wrong on that. Why construction was stopped is unknown but from the rubble and broken blocks the best guess is an earthquake or some other major catastrophe.
Well it looks like I went off on just a bit of a tangent, along with my usual science lesson/rant, but that's what I do. Even considering how far ahead technology may be I doubt I could've imagined a Laser that eats light. I'll be looking into what they're willing to divulge, and it should be pretty damn interesting. I'm guessing it's still on a small scale and it can only neutralize a tiny amount of light; maybe even in the single photon range, but I don't know for sure. I wonder how far they could scale it up. Could they ever make it big enough to make the Sun go dark? It's doubtful but you never know. We'd have a dark star. Bowie'd be proud.
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