Expecting the Impossible

Click here to listen to this feature

Neutral atoms trapping

credit: Jagellonian University

A recent survey showed that over sixty percent of British adults expect the impossible from science.

Well, we are seeing some fantastic things these days. Forty years after the invention of the laser, we’re carrying around compact disc players. Twenty-five years after the advent of fibre optics, we’re making speedy connections on the internet.

One of the most exciting developments in physics today is the field of atomic optics. The optics you learned at school involved mirrors and lenses to manipulate light. Atomic optics switches things around, and uses laser light to manipulate atoms. 

Physicists can now cool atoms down close to the lowest temperature that is theoretically possible - about a million times colder than interstellar space. Under these conditions, atoms exhibit strange behaviour. Rather than acting as particles, they behave as waves with wave lengths as long as that of visible light. This means that scientists can do things with atoms that we normally do with light.

As the techniques of atomic optics are perfected, atomic holography may well make it possible to make real three dimensional replicas of objects, so that we’ll be able to copy objects, not just pictures on paper. So perhaps these survey results are not far off the mark, and we will see some seemingly impossible things come from science.

So next time you read science fiction, keep an open mind, some of those fantasies may soon become facts.