Welcoming a New Year!

A new month and a new year is staring at me from the calendar on the wall. January 2015.  I have yet to pencil in the already growing number of commitments, appointments, and deadlines. I think I'll just put them in my day-timer and keep the calendar clean. It looks better that way.

This month finds me now a contributing writer for the Imramma magazine. Click here! I'm excited about this new journey. I will be writing a column from the Crone's perspective. Funny. I never really thought of myself as a Crone. I never really wanted to think of myself as a Crone. But we all reach that point sooner or later. And I have to say, it's not too bad. I now get senior discounts, though if I was carded, I probably wouldn't but graying hair does have it's advantages. And I have reached an age where I don't really care how people take something I say nor do I care what people think of me. If you know me, then you know my quirks and love me for them anyway. **wink-wink** 
So expect some "Cronish" sorts of posts here every so often.

This new month also brings about a minor make-over here at The CCC. I freshened my pages section (still a bit of a work-in-progress) along with dusting off the sidebars. I also plan on starting a new series about "The Physics of Magic" - where science meets the esoteric. I feel that understanding the 'how' might help with the actual process. Knowledge should be shared. Not kept hidden away in a dark broom closet.

So hang on folks! We should have some fun this year!

Weird Wednesday ~ Frozen Light

German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute. Light is electromagnetic radiation that moves at 300 million meters per second. Over the course of a one minute span, it can travel about 11 million miles (18 million km), or 20 round trips to the moon. 
For this particular experiment, researcher Georg Heinze and his team converted light coherence into atomic coherences. They did so by using a quantum interference effect that makes an opaque medium — in this case a crystal — transparent over a narrow range of light spectra (a process called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)). The researchers shot a laser through this crystal (a source of light), which sent its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. A second beam then switched off the first laser, and as a consequence, the transparency. Thus, the researchers collapsed the superposition — and trapped the second laser beam inside. And they proved the accomplishment by storing — and then successfully retrieving — information in the form of a 100-micrometer-long picture with three horizontal stripes on it.

Got That?

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