You can't hide!

During these times here are a lot of discussions about people losing their privacy, as websites like Facebook allow programs to access all your data. Only more and more of these discussions may appear after invention described in this post. After few years it won't be possible to hide anywhere as researchers found a way how to see what is around the corner! This sounds like it is from science fiction movie but it becomes truth. To successfully complete this, scientists used very advanced devices like a camera which captures images more than a billion times per second! I can bet every sport photographer would be jealous about this as every single moment of basketball match could be captured. Second device used is a femtosecond laser, which emits very very short pulses. Duration of every pulse, which left the laser, is thousand million million times shorter than a second! The brilliance of this idea is that the pulse is shot to the surface (let it be the door in this case as seen in the picture), which allows light to reflect around the corner we need. After reflection light goes into the room or other environment and starts bouncing from all surfaces. Some of these photons reflect back to the door and hits sensor of the camera. This camera can make not only images around the corner but 3D images as well. Mentioned feature is possible because of its capturing speed. It allows capturing photons which travels for different duration of time due to reflection of surfaces at different distances from the door. This looks to be a very simple technology but it really requires a lot of work, especially to write logarithms which could convert received signals into a real picture. And it is a long way till we will be able to use it, but it is coming!  This would be a very useful technology in war because lives could be saved, as soldiers could see if someone is waiting around the corner. It could also be used in cars to see if someone is coming and you can't see it. Believe me this would be very useful in small streets of Crete! I could continue with writing about different uses but there isn’t enough of space for it. Hopefully it just won't be used to stalk people so let's not allow that this very useful technology would go to hands of bad guys.

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Even Superman would be powerless against this...

Inspired by a long break of not writing anything at all, starting internship in laser’s company and appearance of more powerful lasers every day, I decided to present a record achieved few days ago by researchers from Berkley Lab Laser Accelerator called BELLA. This may be useless as with this pace after few days there may appear an article about a new record. And I actually do hope it will happen as this would mean new technological and scientific opportunities. So what have they actually done? They managed to reach one petawatt peak power pulse. It could be compared to the power of million millions of vacuum cleaners or more than 1000 times the power used by United States at any instant time. Why do they use such a huge power for nothing? Where do they get all this energy from? Actually this laser is very short pulsed. Time of the pulse is only 40 femtoseconds (during this time, light traveling at 300 000 000 m/s speed would travel only few micro meters!). So during all this time United States uses almost no electricity and laser usage becomes 40 Watts, just as much as weak light bulb. It looks that scientists are lying about all this enormous power just to get nice numbers but it isn't true as this power is actually achieved due to a very short pulse. And how is it good for us to have such a powerful laser? People won't have a chance to use it in regular activities for decades or even centuries but in science world it is huge news. This would save us billions of dollars as using such powerful laser would make particle accelerators to be only few meter long and still be as powerful as Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Let's just think big. What if instead of few meters the new accelerator would be hundred kilometers (10 000 times more powerful than LHC)? Then it would be easy to find not only Higgs boson but its constituents too. With time these lasers could also be used to ignite fusion which could give cheap electricity to everyone. So let's wait and we will see.