Feynman got his dollar
Nov. 18th, 2003 12:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eubso ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hattifattener and I can each have fifty cents: a vampire casts no shadow. It must transmit 100% of incident light. Still, a vampire is visible; it does reflect light. Hence, a vampire has total optical gain exceeding unity.
Placing any optical element of this sort within a sufficiently well-mirrored chamber will create a runaway optical amplifier, which if it is to be applied to peacetime uses must be equipped with an exceedingly fast-reacting system modulating absorbent damping. If this hurdle can be overcome -- perhaps using a nonlinear element? -- vampires provide unlimited free and non-polluting energy.
hattifattener and I can each have fifty cents: a vampire casts no shadow. It must transmit 100% of incident light. Still, a vampire is visible; it does reflect light. Hence, a vampire has total optical gain exceeding unity.Placing any optical element of this sort within a sufficiently well-mirrored chamber will create a runaway optical amplifier, which if it is to be applied to peacetime uses must be equipped with an exceedingly fast-reacting system modulating absorbent damping. If this hurdle can be overcome -- perhaps using a nonlinear element? -- vampires provide unlimited free and non-polluting energy.
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Re: did someone say nonlinear optics?
Date: 2003-11-18 01:29 pm (UTC)I would have said the opposite. Vampires do not cast shadows or appear in mirrors (nor, we might suspect, do they interact with other purely mechanical detection systems). This seems to imply that they exist only in the nonphysical world.
In some sense, perhaps a vampire is a hallucination; our perceptions of them are psionic projections rather than being transmitted by actual light.
This would resolve the conservation-of-light paradox described earlier. Sadly this theory does not account for other tangible evidence of a vampire's presence.