Foton & Blizzard
I’ve been toying with the idea that photons get trapped in ice like sailors in a storm—ever wondered if that could help us map blizzards?
Photons trapped in ice—sounds like a clever idea, but mapping a blizzard that way would be a nightmare if the ice melts faster than the storm. A simple radar or lidar is usually more reliable, though. Still, if you can pull that trick together, I'm all ears.
Right, radar gives you the big picture but it can get fogged up by the very ice you want to study. I was thinking of embedding tiny quantum dots into a transparent lattice, letting them act as scatterers that reveal the temperature gradient as the ice thaws. It’s a mess of phase shifts and decoherence, but if you can lock it into a feedback loop the system might actually self‑correct—like a snowflake that learns how to melt. Gives the storm a chance to talk back, which is kind of poetic. What do you think?
That’s poetic, but in practice the decoherence will eat the signal before it even knows what’s happening. A feedback loop could steady it, but it has to survive the ice’s temperature swings. If you can pull it off, a snowflake that learns to melt would be a nice triumph over the storm. Just don’t expect it to keep the heating bill down.