Whether a flash of light is visible comes down to a fundamental concept in visual neuroscience known as temporal summation or generally Bloch's Law.

Our eyes don't process light instantaneously, they integrate light over a short window of time (around 10 to 100 milliseconds, depending on whether you are looking through your central or peripheral vision).

Bloch's Law states that for very short durations, the perceived brightness of a flash depends on the total number of photons hitting the retina during that time window, not the duration itself.

So you can flash a standard light source like a normal LED very quickly, like at 1 microsecond or faster, it will be completely invisible. The flash was so short that the total number of photons entering your eye fell way below the minimum threshold required to trigger your photoreceptors and send a signal to your brain.

inversely you can increase the intensity of the light enough that it will always be seen regardless of the duration of the pulse, a high-powered laser pulsed for a femtosecond will remain visible.

Lol yeah it's like ten light-years away.

Depends on how far away it is. 😌

A 2016 Nature study

To be more specific, this study in Nature Communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172

Edit: Ha! NoSpotOfGround beat me by 2 minutes.

My understanding of the physics is that there's no lower limit. People can detect even individual photons.

As long as the pulse has enough energy to change the state of the material in your retina, you will sense it. Intuitively, if an attosecond pulse can melt steel, you can bet you'll see "something" if you fire it at your eyes, even if it's the last thing you see.

A 2016 Nature study found the human eye can detect a single photon just above chance, while conscious sight needs about 5 to 9 photons.

I actually think the tech is mostly there, all we really need is application. Once there's a real world need for quantum computers, they will get more developed over time. If there is nothing to be gained by making them quicker, more efficient, et cetera, then it will remain niche.

Which is partly why I mentioned AI. Currently, of course, most of AI applications run on very powerful GPUs with a huge amount of bandwidth. At some point, it will no longer be profitable to increase scale (not to mention the already disastrous environmental impact). I am hoping that quantum can solve both scale up and evolutionary issues that AI is facing.

Mind that I'm not just talking about LLMs, AI is much broader than just coding assistants or silly chatbots. AI has been around long before ChatGPT, it's just that LLMs have provided a real world use that appeals to a much wider audience (scale up).

When it comes to its evolution, it's mostly about 'putting AI in everything', something that on this platform is a bad thing about which most people here say they don't want it. I can sort of see why for some aspects, but there's always been a voice of resistance for disruptive tech. Combining computers with agriculture was long seen as nonsense, until they started seeing how much data they actually could process in a much shorter time. Enabling internet access on a lot of home appliances was seen as daft until home automation became more widespread. Putting excellent camera tech on portable devices seemed a weird combination until social media required you to share photos all the time. It's unclear which field will benefit most from AI integration at this point, but I'm fairly confident there will be one. Quantum computing can help solve efficiency issues that will give us the opportunity to combine AI with all kinds of applications to see which one might benefit most.

If we stop trying to see the dystopian part of all these developments, I think AI evolution will solve a lot of our issues pertaining to energy usage and transition away from fossil fuels, climate change and the way we live with environmental shifts, language barriers and other sociological challenges that cause friction, space travel and exploration, our understanding of the planet and the universe, education...

But we need to be wary of power struggles, privacy, fascism, time (in the event our ecosystem collapses before AI can help us solve our issues), inequity of access to improvements gained by AI (ie how will the poorest of us benefit. Computers were once only for the elite, now almost everyone has something like a pc, laptop or smartphone).

I'm split 50/50 between optimistic and pessimistic about the future of AI but if we can leverage quantum the way science has promised us quantum may help, that tips the scale to 70/30.

the multiple experts, and they have multiple photos.

eyewitnesses and letters and archeological proof is all we have of basically anything that was 2000+ years ago

Can you at least talk about your field and stuff? Like that past in those area's. Or just willing to answer questions as best you can. We are really relaxed, we can go with any date and time you choose and will nip trolls and douches in the bud immediately. No pressure but you would be our first.

I'm not really a history expert, definitely not authoritatively with sources. I'm more focused on human biology and medicine for my area of expertise.

Optics and photonics is the future of tech imo.

But most of the research seems to be on stuff that will be used by corporations (not affordable for common people).

If this is your primary concern, you need to be in law or politics rather than science. You can't afford principles if you're chasing grant money, and grant money is impossible to come by if you have principles.

Being a math and physics major I would go with algorithms. Look at the current limitations of qam, qpsk, and ofdm algorithms and see where a physics or mathematical gains can be introduced to make fibre and radios more efficient.

Dam know anything about history would love you if you contributed more than just me at !askhistorians@lemmy.world . Still getting it off the ground from a person or bot named karmabot. We are looking for people to help maybe get some ama's going and stuff.

Experts on what kinds of science topics are you looking for?

I miss the golden days of r/askscience and r/askhistorians on Reddit. I was flared contributor on r/askscience for pharmacology and medicine related topics

You really need to ask yourself if you're okay being a literal evil person

I can say a magician pulled a rabbit out of an empty hat, doesn't mean there's actual magic. Belief in your perception is exactly how magic tricks work, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable.

Besides the church a singular time has anyone confirmed the appearance of tissue and blood?

Sabotaging AI

Something like 'Systems Thinking' with a 'Dynamic/Cognitive systems' specialization.. 'Systems' is imho the ultimate abstraction in a hierarchical universe and goes well with future AGI that can setup and manipulate all the IO, data-flow, sub/super-systems and state details of any system.

Definitely biotechnology. The garage business revolution has been delayed for years (or is limited to unhelpful drugs of abuse).

I'm doing applied math from a contemporary philosophy (and a little physics) perspective. I want to approach it from the concept of the umwelt and link semicircular canals to dimensional perception using transformers [hagfish(1), lampreys(2), zebrafish(3)] then extrapolate to higher dimensions.

If you are interested in hardware, then the key words are computer architecture. There are a lot of great research going on in this domain! I am thinking of RISC-V which is a "new" instruction set (not so new, but it is currently in heavy development). I am thinking of many dedicated components for audio/video processing (FFT, codec, ..), or for tensor processing (for neural network). These things are more and more present in all the computers (including smartphone), and there are game-changing. For example all the machine of Apple now embed a TPU (Tensor Process Unit). If you are more interested in the physics behind all this, there are also a lot going on (stacked semiconductors, hybrid computers, ..). But this is not my field of expertise.

You need to speak with your prof or Academic advisor, because if you want to avoid the corporate world, you will have to go into Academia. Could be anywhere really. Electronics engineering, photonics, quantum computing, materials science, lasers. It's an enormous field. Find research you love, reach out to them and see if you can join someone's team.

I’d get into optical computing.

Look up Intel’s research into optical buses, as an example. Or experiments in pure optical inference. I just find this whole field extremely practical in a wide range, from “usefully augmenting silicon PC chips” to specialized accelerators to farther-out computing paradigms.

I’d also look into Josephine Junction computation. If there’s a sudden breakthrough in room temperature superconductivity, that becomes very important, very quickly.

I also find “biological computers” or those emulating biology interesting, but don’t understand enough about them to even begin to assess it.

I’m less enthusiastic about quantum computing. It’s extremely useful in a few niches, but it feels like it’s hit crypto-like levels of hype: a narrowly useful tech that’s being pushed way beyond what it’s good at.

It is related to the other areas I listed, though.

Pretty much all this stuff will be corporate-first though.

That’s just how it works. They pay the big R&D for prototypes, and the mass commercialization comes later.

If you’re more directly interested in consumer tech, you’ll have to look into memresistors, alternative lithography like gallium or nanotubes, chiplets and “split” architectures and interconnects, things like that. ECE magazines talk about this stuff constantly because it’s closer mass commercialization.

most of the research seems to be on stuff that will be used by corporations (not affordable for common people)

To be fair, I think that's kind of always been the case for cutting-edge computer research. The first computers were the size of a room or a small building, and only universities, governments, and large companies could afford to have one. Over time, hardware becomes smaller, faster, and cheaper, and now most people have a computer in their pocket.

I'd say quantum computing. It's not as though this will all be happening quickly, if you want to work with high end hardware before it reaches consumers you'd need to find some sort of company like Samsung's R&D department. But that'll only be chip manufacturing, memory, stuff like that.

CPU's in x86 architecture are on their way out, Arm is becoming more popular (SoC) but the other way really is quantum computing. That's a field they want, something they've not yet cracked. Tever transferred some qubits, but it's just a big boom waiting to happen that will really accelerate AI as well.