“You’ve seen this new nano-tech stuff, haven’t you?” I ask.
“Yes, it’s going to change much of what we do. I am excited about the medical applications.”
“Medical…? No, I was thinking about commercial signs. Big ones. Like Times-Square large.”
“I thought we were talking about nanotechnology?" you query. "The little stuff measured in billionths of a meter.”
“Well, that, too, I suppose. But now we’re going to be able to turn entire skyscrapers into flashing signs thanks to U. of Cambridge scientists. They invented a pixel a million times smaller than the pixels in your IPad or IPhone. * As the authors write in their abstract, ‘Here, we present scalable electrically driven color-changing metasurfaces…Their…ultralow energy consumption…[offers] vivid, uniform, nonfading color…[in] in films which are a hundredfold thinner than current displays.’ We don’t have to understand the technology they used to make the pixels, just the application. Put these little babies on a building, and you can cheaply turn it into a giant flashing advertisement screen with bright colors. We’re about to make the world one big Times Square.”
“You think that that’s possible? You realize what that means. We already have so much light pollution that we can’t see the stars on the horizon unless we get outside our brightly lighted cities. We’re going to have to go to more remote places to see the wonders of the night sky, maybe to Patagonia.”
“Yeah, but those little twinkling sky lights that amazed the ancients can’t compare with modern color displays that can flash mesmerizing images. Isn’t it soon going to be a virtual world, anyway? I mean, look at the children, their faces reflecting the glow of smartphones and tablets, their bespectacled eyes bloodshot from electronic games. Who needs the reality of the universe when one can hold a virtual universe in one’s lap? And now, the pixels will be so much more vibrant in a thin, lightweight and bendable surface. Again, kind of bragging, the Cambridge inventors say, ‘These unique characteristics highlight its potential for active plasmonics in real-world applications including color-changing wallpapers, smart windows, traffic management systems, electrical signage, and many types of display panels.’ We’re about to be surrounded by colors so intense we’ll think we’re in a HD cartoon, ironically, to use one of their words, in real-world applications.”
“I’m not excited," you say. "There will soon be a generation of kids who will never know darkness. Makes me think of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’: ‘Hello, Darkness, my old friend/I’ve come to talk with you again/Because a vision softly creeping/Left its seeds while I was sleeping/And the vision that was planted in my brain/Still remains/Within the sound of silence…When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light/That split the night….’ Little did those two composers know the extent to which they were prophetic.’ Who’s going to know darkness in this brightly lighted world? Who’s going to know a nighttime horizon with stars? Who will even conceive that he or she could talk to darkness in silence?”
*Peng, Jialong, Hyeon-Ho Jeong, Qianqi Lini, Sean Cormier, HsiLing Liang, Michael F. L. De Volder, Silvia Vignolini. Scalable electrochromic nanopixels using plasmonics. Science Advances 10 May 2019, Vol. 5, no. 5 eaaw2205 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2205. Available online at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaaw2205
“Yes, it’s going to change much of what we do. I am excited about the medical applications.”
“Medical…? No, I was thinking about commercial signs. Big ones. Like Times-Square large.”
“I thought we were talking about nanotechnology?" you query. "The little stuff measured in billionths of a meter.”
“Well, that, too, I suppose. But now we’re going to be able to turn entire skyscrapers into flashing signs thanks to U. of Cambridge scientists. They invented a pixel a million times smaller than the pixels in your IPad or IPhone. * As the authors write in their abstract, ‘Here, we present scalable electrically driven color-changing metasurfaces…Their…ultralow energy consumption…[offers] vivid, uniform, nonfading color…[in] in films which are a hundredfold thinner than current displays.’ We don’t have to understand the technology they used to make the pixels, just the application. Put these little babies on a building, and you can cheaply turn it into a giant flashing advertisement screen with bright colors. We’re about to make the world one big Times Square.”
“You think that that’s possible? You realize what that means. We already have so much light pollution that we can’t see the stars on the horizon unless we get outside our brightly lighted cities. We’re going to have to go to more remote places to see the wonders of the night sky, maybe to Patagonia.”
“Yeah, but those little twinkling sky lights that amazed the ancients can’t compare with modern color displays that can flash mesmerizing images. Isn’t it soon going to be a virtual world, anyway? I mean, look at the children, their faces reflecting the glow of smartphones and tablets, their bespectacled eyes bloodshot from electronic games. Who needs the reality of the universe when one can hold a virtual universe in one’s lap? And now, the pixels will be so much more vibrant in a thin, lightweight and bendable surface. Again, kind of bragging, the Cambridge inventors say, ‘These unique characteristics highlight its potential for active plasmonics in real-world applications including color-changing wallpapers, smart windows, traffic management systems, electrical signage, and many types of display panels.’ We’re about to be surrounded by colors so intense we’ll think we’re in a HD cartoon, ironically, to use one of their words, in real-world applications.”
“I’m not excited," you say. "There will soon be a generation of kids who will never know darkness. Makes me think of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’: ‘Hello, Darkness, my old friend/I’ve come to talk with you again/Because a vision softly creeping/Left its seeds while I was sleeping/And the vision that was planted in my brain/Still remains/Within the sound of silence…When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light/That split the night….’ Little did those two composers know the extent to which they were prophetic.’ Who’s going to know darkness in this brightly lighted world? Who’s going to know a nighttime horizon with stars? Who will even conceive that he or she could talk to darkness in silence?”
*Peng, Jialong, Hyeon-Ho Jeong, Qianqi Lini, Sean Cormier, HsiLing Liang, Michael F. L. De Volder, Silvia Vignolini. Scalable electrochromic nanopixels using plasmonics. Science Advances 10 May 2019, Vol. 5, no. 5 eaaw2205 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2205. Available online at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaaw2205
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