Posted on 07/27/2009 11:22:27 AM PDT by saganite
Your describing a Singularity of technological change.
Compare the results of glass in a fire and aluminum in a fire...
True, but I think it applies to a lot of singularities.
I doubt much will change in the field of buggy whips for a while since there is very little r&d going into that. Meanwhile, LED tv’s have effectively made LCD and Plazma tv’s instantly antiquated, but not yet obsolete.
Yeah! And you'll need to keep the door open for only 20 femtoseconds before there will be nothing to see.....saving lots of CO2 emissions somewhere.
If you will indulge me for a second, I’ll explain a bit further.
Some glasses (Magnesium fluoride, Calcium fluoride, fused silica) are transparent in what we call vacuum ultraviolet wavelengths (~120-300 nm, where visible light is 400-700 nm).
The region from 10-100 nm is known as extreme ultraviolet (EUV), where nothing transmits, and few materials even reflect with optical quality.
Once you get to shorter wavelengths, you get into the x-ray region, where materials again become transparent. So anything that is transparent at all in the EUV is a big discovery.
MD, who builds EUV cameras for a living
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