First ‘water-wave’ laser created | Hacker News Reader

First ‘water-wave’ laser created

sciencebulletin.org

62 pointsdevinp19 comments

I got really excited about the idea of coherent water waves, but no...

This is probably the closest thing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WffR6HrEqTA&t=40s

Me too...

"How on earth did they get water waves to obey Bose-Einstein stats!"

> The possibility of creating a laser through the interaction of light with water waves has not been examined, Carmon said, mainly due to the huge difference between the low frequency of water waves on the surface of a liquid (approximately 1,000 oscillations per second) and the high frequency of light wave oscillations (1014 oscillations per second).

I think that's a typo - unless the light actually has a frequency of 1khz, or I misunderstood the article.

10^14 is what they were going for. It is indeed a typo.

They're using the "<sup>" HTML tag for the exponent. It's not a typo; it's crap rendering.

A bad css reset file seems to be the problem. It sets `vertical-align: baseline` on just about everything, including the sub and sup tags. Then never sets sub and sup back to anything reasonable.

> 10^14

The lesson in this: All this incredible markup syntax, rendering engines, and formatting tools, but if you want to be absolutely sure that you data is communicated correctly, better use plaintext.

Does unicode count?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...

I'd say the lesson is CSS more delicately, though this is hard to do without better CSS.

For whatever reason, their CSS overrides the vertical-align of a large number of elements (possibly all of them?) to "vertical-align: baseline;". Odd, to say the least.

10¹⁴

Searching the page for "14" misses this.

It shouldn't; search should operate in compatibility normalization space (preferably NFKD). Chrome on Windows gets this right, btw.

Searching the page for either digit misses it (Firefox 50.0.2)

what did you do here? Renders as 10^1^4

    1    000031 DIGIT ONE
    0    000030 DIGIT ZERO
    ¹    0000B9 SUPERSCRIPT ONE
    ⁴    002074 SUPERSCRIPT FOUR

Ah ok must be my font.

10e14

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