Untitled Essay Research Paper Holograms — страница 2

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that kind of immortality -a hologram of the 80 year-old can be seen these days on the stage in London, in a musical called Time. New Waves When it comes to looking at the future uses of holography, pictures are anything but the whole picture. Here are just a couple of the more unusual possibilities. Consider this: you’re in a windowless room in the middle of an office tower, but you’re reading by the light of the noonday sun! How can this be? A new invention that incorporates holograms into widow glazings makes it possible. Holograms can bend light to create complex 3- D images, but they can also simply redirect light rays. The window glaze holograms could focus sunlight coming through a window into a narrow beam, funnel it into an air duct with reflective walls above the

ceiling and send it down the hall to your windowless cubbyhole. That could cut lighting costs and conserve energy. The holograms could even guide sunlight into the gloomy gaps between city skyscrapers and since they can bend light of different colors in different directions, they could be used to filter out the hot infrared light rays that stream through your car windows to bake you on summer days. Or, how about holding an entire library in the palm of your hand? Holography makes it theoretically possible. Words or pictures could be translated into a code of alternating light and dark spots and stored in an unbelievably tiny space. That’s because light waves are very, very skinny. You could lay about 1000 lightwaves side by side across the width of the period at the end of this

sentence. One calculation holds that by using holograms, the U. S. Library of Congress could be stored in the space of a sugar cube. For now, holographic data storage remains little more than a fascinating idea because the materials needed to do the job haven’t been invented yet. But it’s clear that holograms, which author Isaac Asimov called “the greatest advance in imaging since the eye” will continue to make waves in the world of science.