Eternal 5D data storage could record the history of humankind

southampton.ac.uk

10 pointsbigblind2 comments

I wish they had explained how they utilize five dimensions in our three (or four) dimensional world. I could understand if five "tracks" of data were stored in a single physical stream, but that has nothing to do with dimensions.

Searching for the paper mentioned in the article turned up this: http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/fileadmin/downloads/5D_Data_Stora...

The five dimensions are in the first paragraph:

More recently self - assembled nanogratings produced by ultrafast laser writing in glass were proposed for the polarization multiplexed optical memory, where the information encodi ng would be realized by means of two birefringence parameters, i.e. the slow axis orientation (4th dimension) and strength of retardance (5th dimension), in addition to three spatial coordinates [3,4] .

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