Fascinating.

They threw in the beer ref. that 'ill keep em comin'. now if they had worked in a midget referance. that would have clenched the bastard. God, Humours getting 1920ish

Imagine: Laser pointers replacing guns.

Oh yeah, Slayerswine, Damnit Jim! Good pic! you are cool man. prolific even.

Wow, this is going to be so great!!! Because we all know the common person's need to move microscopic particles around in a precise manner! One in every home by 2010, I GAR-ON-TEE!!!

/sarcasm

A car in every garage and a molecule transporting beam in every pot. Plus, we'll be able to power it using cold fusion!

I'm sure many boffins died for this information.

(-0-)

{treekie on}
I thought a tractor beam and teleporter were two different things....
{/trekkie off}

Wow. Comfortably_Numb
i dunno for sure, but that sure sounds like a STAR WARS reference to me... "boffins" "Bothans"...

now who's the geek.

Vertual:
Holy C R A P! that link is scary, cause with teleportation you can actually do replication (like star trek) except the only difference is that you're destroying the original source material. i hope they don't use mpeg (lossy) compression when transporting & re-assembling the particles.

I think this was invented a long time ago............its called money

Didn't this guy build a mini tractor beam?

>french accent/french accent<

i love that line, especially when misused...
"many bothans died to bring us those doughnuts..."

french accent

i told them we already got one

/french accent

(notes checked box)

I'm sure that your average farker is wondering how it feels in the genital region.

I know i am.

VIniVIniVIni: Nice Python reference. hehehe

We've been getting a lot of those recently. I like.

Um .. didn;t anyone pick up the reference to " Cork screw laser beam " ...

Scottie " Damit captian we can not break the laws of physics " /Scottie

I am thinking perhaps to acheive this bent light they must have somthing so incredibly massive ( High mass) that it is bending the light around it ..

Can anyone else advise how they managed to make a light beam bend ?

The actual beam is probably nothing like a corkscrew it is probably just a generalization so stupid people can understand.

They used an interference pattern.

That might work seeing that light has a wave particle duality, but can you form a corkscrew type pattern from two sine waves which are perpendicuar to each other and out of phase by ninty degrees, or is that just radio waves? Well either way they should be similar they are both electromagnetic waves.

Interference pattern? Don't be silly... they probably just realigned the dilythium matrix to match the shield harmonics.
That or many many many tiny little mirrors along the insides of a straw, bouncing (bending) the beam into the shape of a helix (corkscrew for you alcoholic Brits).

Yeah, I wondering about that corkscrew laser thing as well.

The mirrors sound like the best explanation, but don't sound practical.

I'll opt for the "they've discovered how to warp space-time" theory. *nods*

The above theories work on a positioning system .. but not on a tractor (detractor) method.. ( can push but not pull )

Hmmm if the light beam was being projected from somethign moving fast enough if would work in reverse time cuasing the push method to be a pull method ?? Hence why it can only be used on small nearly massless molocules.

Nano/Microtech news is not exactly a Fark staple.

Throw the bread and circus' already, they're clamoring with their cliche Python and Simpsons references! And, ah, the whole "boobies" thing.

/cliche

That would not be in agreement with the Theory of Relativity, the fastest any object can move in normal space is the speed of light if an object with a laser attached to it were moving at the speed of light the laser could not move because the object is already moving at the speed of light.

Also they construct the helix using an interferance pattern, for example if a sine wave with an amplitude of 1 was moving towards the positive x direction and a sine wave with an amplitude of negative 1 is moving in the negative x direction when they collide they will anniliate each other and there wil be no trace of any wave left. Now if we take two beams moving from the same point, if we alter the frequency and amplitude of one of the lasers it would affect the other thus creating a helix, easier said than done of course

Theroy of relativity was dissed by its creator. I can prove it is wrong .. 2 objects traveling at 3/4 speed of light collide. nuff said.

but anyway

I never said the laser generator was traveling at the speed of light .. it would just have to be moving a little bit - it the laser would be traveling at the speed of light + generator speed ..

blue shift ?

"But what's more, if it works for small things, there's a good chance that it can be expanded in scale in the future, allowing you to beam your kids off the electricity pylons into a babypen or pull your pint of beer across the table rather than to reach out for it. Think of the possibilities!"

I could rearrange my kids' molecules without even touching them! "Dammit, Bobby! Stop hitting your sister, or I'll turn you into a quivering mass of body fluids, like I did to the dog!"

beam me up scotty (it had 2 be said)

"many bothans died to bring us those doughnuts..."

HAHAHAHAHA!! I am so using that when I go back to work at Starbucks tomorrow!

"Many Bothans died to make you this half-caf vanilla latte with whipped cream."

Trader_of_shots, thank you for the first bellowing laugh of the day. That's pretty impressive that you can disprove one of Einstein's theories in a single "nuff said" sentence while being completely wrong at the same time.

An observer "A" travelling at 0.75c directly towards an object "B", which is travelling at 0.75c in directly the opposite direction, will NOT observe object "B" to be travelling towards him at 1.5c. He will observe it to be travelling towards him at some speed less than c. No observer in any frame of reference will view any object with mass to exceed or equal the speed of light. I laugh condescendingly at your pitiful attempt at applying kinematics to matters of which you know nothing.

Einstein's law does not have a factor of an observer.

When did they add this ?

and yes it makes a huge difference

Einstein's law does not have a factor of an observer.

When did they add this ?

And if you wanna throw bullshiat line of sight crap into it

what is two "observers where moving away from each other at 3/4 speed of light" by your theroy one is moving away at 1.5 times the speed of light"

"The positions relative to the body of reference (railway carriage or embankment) have already been defined in detail in the preceding section. If instead of "body of reference" we insert "system of co-ordinates," which is a useful idea for mathematical description, we are in a position to say: The stone traverses a straight line relative to a system of co-ordinates rigidly attached to the carriage, but relative to a system of co-ordinates rigidly attached to the ground (embankment) it describes a parabola. With the aid of this example it is clearly seen that there is no such thing as an independently existing trajectory (lit. "path-curve"), but only a trajectory relative to a particular body of reference."

- Albert Einstein, "Relativity, The Special and General Theory", Chapter III

He uses the terms "body of reference", "frame of reference", and "observer" interchangeably throughout. Whether we're talking about a human observer or just a hypothetical machine capable of sensing light and noting the passage of time and then storing and/or transmitting its observations, it makes no difference.

As for your observers moving away from each other, the answer is the same. A sees B moving away at a speed that is less than c, and B sees A moving away at a speed that is less than c.

Say these are two spaceships, and B fires a laser at A as they're travelling away from each other. The laser travels at the speed of light. From B's frame of reference, A is moving away but the laser travels at the speed of light and eventually hits A. So A must appear to be travelling at less than c. From C's frame of reference (some guy on a nearby planet), A is moving away but the laser travels at the speed of light and eventually hits A. So A must appear to be travelling at less than c. From any frame of reference, the laser will travel at the speed of light and any object with mass will travel at less than the speed of light.

If you work it out using regular math and regular Euclidian geometry, it doesn't work out! That's why there is a seperate theory. Duh.

Indeed, Comfortably_Numb, more boffins than you could calculate.

if it works for small things, there's a good chance that it can be expanded in scale in the future,

Oh my God, it's time to buy more BASF stock.

And I should explain more clearly why I included that quoted passage.

Everything is relative to the frame of reference. The example is a man on a train dropping a stone out of a window, while another man on the ground watches. The man on the train sees the stone fall straight down, according to his frame of reference. The man on the ground sees it fall in a parabola, according to his frame of reference. Which is it really? We say that it "really" falls in a parabola, but only because we treat the Earth as a fixed, rigid place to anchor a coordinate system.

When dealing with light or objects moving at close to the speed of light, bodies of reference are no longer uniform. There is no fixed absolute that says "this is a second, this is a meter, and that's final." A meter to you is not a meter to me. A second to you is not a second to me.

Girl, you thought he was a man, but he was a boffin

Yeah, optical tweezers. This 'story' is nothing new.

you people are morons, can you say
"P-O-L-A-R-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N"? you just make a circulary polarized beam, catch is its goona work only on cgarged or polarized molecules, but almost all molecules have at least dipole moment. I recon its much complex but the this is the basic idea.

So with the combination of nano technology could someone get this system eventually installed in their body. High tech Jedi powers perhaps.
What if you installed something like that in some shoes? Of course, I bet batteries would be the major hold back. Damn, where is my fission belt buckle!

???What????,Who.............What?

yo, I want the full, not-for-layman article, biach!

Since the gizmo works using interference patterns, I doubt that this thing will scale up to larger objects. Unless you use REALLY LONG wavelengths, that is... hmmm...

this is a repeat from last year

Cor! Blimey!

Zim1-

But since the wavelength grows with increasing speed from the observer, with the 2 receding spoaceships, wouldn't the beam be redshifted to nothing? (from the view of the other ship)
I've got one for you: Say you have a video camera on 1 ship, transmitting to the other ship. What would they see as the ships approached c?