There’s been a lot of buzz lately in the science blogosphere about a recent experiment where physicists created a gas of quantum particles with a negative temperature – negative as in, below absolute zero. This is pretty strange, because absolute zero is supposed to be that temperature at which all atomic motion ceases, where atoms that normally jiggle about freeze in their places, and come to a complete standstill.
Can we find evidence for quantum gravity? That’s a major puzzle in Physics. This might be possible using a simple table-top experiment, according to Jacob Bekenstein, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Who stop at femtotech? Physics also allows attotechnology and beyond to zeptotechnology. These “X-Tech” possibilities provide a potential solution to the Fermi Paradox (“where are all the nonhuman civilizations?”). We may need a paradigm shift from SETI to SIPI — the Search for Infra Particle Intelligence!
My goal in this essay is an ambitious one: to show how the properties of quarks and gluons can be used (in principle) to perform computation at the femtometer (i.e. 10^-15 meter) scale. This is admittedly highly speculative and theoretical material — but it’s all within the domain of science, and given the reality of exponential advance, may well become practical technology sometime in this century.
