posted on Aug, 4 2006 @ 03:54 PM
The photo in the royal soc bit is a photoshop to be dramatic. The alternate text is "This is what you'd see if the effect worked with the atoms in
your hand", which is a bit of a giveaway.
It doesn't.
If you read the actual published tech paper, they managed to entrain the plasmon states in a monatomic layer of one material for a few nanoseconds.
Now they're after more funding. It's not like you do that by saying "Wow, we managed this just well enough to detect that it happened. It's not
like you could actually see it or something. So, give us a lot more money to run the lab, pay our salaries, and let us hire a few more grad students
at a pittance, and we'll go play with it some more, maybe in a few years we can manage to do it for 100 microseconds"
Nope, that doesn't get you the big bucks. What you say is "If you fund us some more, we will make you a Harry Potter ray gun, maybe" knowing all
the while that you aren't. But the politicos have the money, and they don't understand what you're doing anyway, and by the time you don't come up
with it, they will have been ousted from office or forgotten you.