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"The SF approach: an awareness that things could have been different, that this is one of many possible worlds, that if you came to this world from some other planet, this would be a science fiction world."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Slow Glass (Scenedow) | ||
| A window made of Bose-Einstein Condensate that slows light to a snail's pace. |
A man and his wife go looking for a good deal on a woodlands "scenedow" for their apartment.
| The most important effect, in the eyes of the average individual, was that light took a long time to pass through a sheet of slow glass. A new piece was always jet black because nothing had yet come through, but one could stand the glass beside, say, a woodland lake until the scene emerged, perhaps a year later. If the glass was then removed and installed in a dismal city flat, the flat would—for that year—appear to overlook the woodland lake. |
| Technovelgy from Light of Other Days,
by Bob Shaw. Published by Analog in 1968 Additional resources -
|
A piece of exposed slow glass was called a "scenedow:"
Bose-Einstein condensates are created when atoms are cooled to absolute zero; the atoms collapse into the lowest quantum state, producing a superfluid. Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein worked out the details in the 1920's. The unusual optical properties of BECs were predicted at that time.
Bose-Einstein condensates have optical densities such that the speed of light passing through the mass is extremely low - walking speed as opposed to its usual 186,000 miles per second.
This idea was used prior to Shaw's story; see the slow glass rod from The Exhalted, a 1940 short story by L. Sprague de Camp.
If you're interested in making light do tricks, check out NYC Heliostats and Star Wars Orbital Mirrors.
See the "Slow Glass-related news items" below for real-world applications.
Compare to glassite from Brigands of the Moon (1930) by Ray Cummings,
artificial transparent element from Last and First Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon,
neo-crystal from Master of the Asteroid (1932) by Clark Ashton Smith,
transparent car roof from Sinister Barrier (1939) by Eric Frank Russell,
plani glass from Crystalized Thought (1937) by Nat Schachner and
thermalite from Planet of Eternal Night (1939) by John W. Campbell.
Apart from its stupendous novelty value, the commercial success of slow glass was founded on the fact that having a scenedow was the exact emotional equivalent of owning land. The meanest cave dweller could look out on misty parks—and who was to say they weren't his? A man who really owns tailored gardens and estates doesn't spend his time proving his ownership by crawling on his ground, feeling, smelling, tasting it. All he receives from the land are light patterns, and with scenedows those patterns could be taken into coal mines, submarines, prison cells.
This story anticipates the successful creation of Bose-Einstein condensates in 1995. A dilute vapor consisting of approximately 2000 rubidium-87 atoms was cooled to one twenty-billionth Kelvin (not degrees Kelvin - see minor note comments).
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Light of Other Days
More Ideas
and Technology by Bob Shaw
Tech news articles related to Light of Other Days
Tech news articles related to works by Bob Shaw
Slow Glass (Scenedow)-related
news articles:
- Light Captured In A Crystal
- Slow Light 'Scenedow' Close At Hand
- eBayaday Sells A View On eBay
| 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.
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'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.'
