Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>johncarlosbaez</span></a></span> Ooooh!</p><p>So ... I've had a theory of ... stuff ... for a while, one aspect of which goes a bit like this:</p><p>Phenomena for recording or transmission of information have a <em>modifiable</em> regularity which can usefully generated, preserved or transmitted (for recording or signalling systems respectively), and detected.</p><p>Think of Schroedinger's "aperiodic crystals", a notion I'd first encountered ... maybe four decades ago. (Not sure if it was Hofstadter's <em>Goedel, Escher, Bach</em> or perhaps Jeremy Campbell's <em>Grammatical Man</em>, but mid/late 1980s, regardless.)</p><p>This means that there are certain phenomena which immediately suggest themselves as <em>recording media</em> or <em>transmission channels</em>. The regularity of a smooth stone, clay, or papyrus, parchment, or paper surface, for example, which can be etched or inked. Vinyl and polycarbonate can be etched with analogue waveforms or digital bit-patterns. The regularity of a magnetic medium whose polarity can be reversed. The regularity of a waveform, be it audio, radio, or optical. And the transmission channels of speaking tubes, RF waveguides, or fibre-optic strands.</p><p>EMF, masers, and lasers in this view are fairly readily apparent as possible <em>transmission</em> media, I realised after the fact.</p><p>And the extreme regularity of graphene <em>suggests</em> that it might be usable as an extremely thin, small-structured recording medium. The challenges I'd seen for this were how it might be transformed, whether or not those transformations were regular over time, and whether or not the transformations were nondestructively detectable. That is, can it be written, preserved, and read over time.</p><p>And this suggests to me that it <em>might</em> be one such method for doing so.</p><p>(I'm not the first person to think of graphene as a data storage medium. Though I'm not aware that there's been any <em>successful</em> practical demonstration as yet.)</p><p>Incidentally, transistor memory is sort of a curious exception to my recording-medium notion in that it consists of states which are (destructively) read, and which aren't particularly reliable, though they can be sustained through a destructive read/rewrite process.</p><p>And if not graphene, then perhaps <em>something similar to it</em> in which a regular lattice can be disrupted.</p><p>Related notion: the symmetry between <em>records</em> and <em>signals</em> as existing in space-time and energy-matter respectively: </p><ul><li><p><strong>Signals</strong> act to <em>transmit</em> an encoded symbolic message from a <em>transmitter</em> across <em>space</em> through a <em>channel</em> by variations in <em>energy</em> over <em>time</em> to a <em>receiver</em> possibly resulting in a <em>record</em>.</p></li><li><p><strong>Records</strong> act to <em>write</em> an encoded symbolic message from a <em>writer</em> across <em>time</em> through a <em>substrate</em> by variations in <em>matter</em> over <em>space</em> to a <em>reader</em> possibly resulting a <em>signal</em>.</p></li></ul><p><a href="https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106388529488243431" translate="no" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">toot.cat/@dredmorbius/10638852</span><span class="invisible">9488243431</span></a>.)</p><p><a href="https://toot.cat/tags/graphene" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>graphene</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/recording" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>recording</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/RecordingMedia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>RecordingMedia</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/DataStorage" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DataStorage</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/RecordsAndSignals" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>RecordsAndSignals</span></a></p>