Quantum Dots

[Jimmy Higgins]

link
Well, it is about time television technology got the nod from the Nobel Prize committee. Quantum Dots are all the rage and the creators (or the people credited creating them) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Quantum dots are small. How small? Well from the article...

So how small are the particles? Consider how much smaller a soccer ball is than the entire Earth. Quantum dots are that much smaller than the soccer ball.

Yeah, not very helpful there WashPo. What is with journalism and anything remotely related to science?

Size of quantum dots. 1.5 to 10 nm in size. Being an American, I had no idea what that meant. bilby informed me that is the equivalent how much smaller a football is than the entire Earth. Damn Aussies.

So I did a little more searching. A pixel on a tv screen is 0.26 mm. Now while that 0.26 mm looks similar to the 1.5 nm to 10 nm, literally just one n short, after four hours of searching on line, I found out that 1 mm = 1,000,000 nm! Apparently those n's are huge! I can only imagine the value if you flip it upside down. After creating a spreadsheet I was able to determine that 1 pixel = 260,000 nm. 260,000 is a much bigger number than 1.5 or 10, and according to a mathematician who told me to stop calling them, as well as all the numbers in between 1.5 and 10. This makes a quantum dot, to quote the paper cited above "fucking small".

We were able to fit more quantum dots on the tip of pin than we could angels, and with a lot less dying angels!

Incredible!

What does this mean? Well, nothing for you, you can't afford a television that utilizes this technology, nor do we have the capability to actually film to such a resolution, nor have the biological capacity to actual resolve such resolution!

So why is it important? Well, science stuff, like you know, nano-stuff. This creates a whole new range of plot devices for Hollywood to completely mess up. That alone is worth $20 or so billion in to the national economy... $35 billion when including international sales.

Where do we go from here? Well, with dots on the scale of 1.5 to 10 nm, it is going to be hard to split it down even further, so the only place left to go is the opposite direction. Expect scientists to try to create megadots. Dots so large they are bigger in proportion of the Earth compared to a soccer ball.

I love living in the future!

 

[steve_bank]

At present, IC critical dimensions (or smallest dimensions of IC elements) are in the order of 10 nanometers (nm: 10-9m), which is extremely small.

Metric prefix - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[bilby]

What is with journalism and anything remotely related to science?

The vast majority of journalists hated science classes in school, and stopped taking them as soon as they possibly could, in favour of English Literature, History, and Politics.

Journalists with a decent secondary school level science education are few and far between; Journalists with a bachelor's degree in science are vanishingly rare, and those with a science doctorate are like hen's teeth. On the flip side, most scientists had enough on their plates learning actually useful stuff about reality, and so never bothered to learn how to write effectively for a general audience. (Most didnt even bother learning how to correctly use apostrophe's).

Even when an article about science is written by a journalist who actually understands any science, their editor almost certainly doesn't. And insists that they dumb everything down.

And, of course, those editors are right, from a commercial perspective. Most of their readership would be angry and hurt, if articles assumed a very basic level of understanding that those readers lack.

A newspaper article that assumes readers are familiar with the Odyssey, or the Iliad, or the plot of King Lear is, for some reason, not seen as an insult to the intelligence of those readers who are clueless about those things. But assuming that your readers know the boiling point of water at sea level is guaranteed to anger the vast majority of them, because not only are they completely ignorant of it, but they also don't want to ever be reminded of their ignorance about it.

To quote Teen Talk Barbie: "Math is tough". Shakespeare is for smart people, but science is for nerds and geeks. Assuming (incorrectly) that your audience are smart, is OK. But wrongly accusing them of being nerds? That just angers them.

 

[James Brown]

I see what you did there.

 

[Jarhyn]

link
Well, it is about time television technology got the nod from the Nobel Prize committee. Quantum Dots are all the rage and the creators (or the people credited creating them) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Quantum dots are small. How small? Well from the article...

So how small are the particles? Consider how much smaller a soccer ball is than the entire Earth. Quantum dots are that much smaller than the soccer ball.

Yeah, not very helpful there WashPo. What is with journalism and anything remotely related to science?

Size of quantum dots. 1.5 to 10 nm in size. Being an American, I had no idea what that meant. bilby informed me that is the equivalent how much smaller a football is than the entire Earth. Damn Aussies.

So I did a little more searching. A pixel on a tv screen is 0.26 mm. Now while that 0.26 mm looks similar to the 1.5 nm to 10 nm, literally just one n short, after four hours of searching on line, I found out that 1 mm = 1,000,000 nm! Apparently those n's are huge! I can only imagine the value if you flip it upside down. After creating a spreadsheet I was able to determine that 1 pixel = 260,000 nm. 260,000 is a much bigger number than 1.5 or 10, and according to a mathematician who told me to stop calling them, as well as all the numbers in between 1.5 and 10. This makes a quantum dot, to quote the paper cited above "fucking small".

We were able to fit more quantum dots on the tip of pin than we could angels, and with a lot less dying angels!

Incredible!

What does this mean? Well, nothing for you, you can't afford a television that utilizes this technology, nor do we have the capability to actually film to such a resolution, nor have the biological capacity to actual resolve such resolution!

So why is it important? Well, science stuff, like you know, nano-stuff. This creates a whole new range of plot devices for Hollywood to completely mess up. That alone is worth $20 or so billion in to the national economy... $35 billion when including international sales.

Where do we go from here? Well, with dots on the scale of 1.5 to 10 nm, it is going to be hard to split it down even further, so the only place left to go is the opposite direction. Expect scientists to try to create megadots. Dots so large they are bigger in proportion of the Earth compared to a soccer ball.

I love living in the future!

This also allows the ability to create extremely high resolution capture devices, and to digitize extremely high resolution radio and laser telescope data, as well as to create processors that exchange photons rather than electrons to drive switching behaviors.

 

[steve_bank]

Quantum dots are trivial.

Quantum octagons, that would be something.