@johncarlosbaez Ooooh!
So ... I've had a theory of ... stuff ... for a while, one aspect of which goes a bit like this:
Phenomena for recording or transmission of information have a modifiable regularity which can usefully generated, preserved or transmitted (for recording or signalling systems respectively), and detected.
Think of Schroedinger's "aperiodic crystals", a notion I'd first encountered ... maybe four decades ago. (Not sure if it was Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach or perhaps Jeremy Campbell's Grammatical Man, but mid/late 1980s, regardless.)
This means that there are certain phenomena which immediately suggest themselves as recording media or transmission channels. 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.
EMF, masers, and lasers in this view are fairly readily apparent as possible transmission media, I realised after the fact.
And the extreme regularity of graphene suggests 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.
And this suggests to me that it might be one such method for doing so.
(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 successful practical demonstration as yet.)
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.
And if not graphene, then perhaps something similar to it in which a regular lattice can be disrupted.
Related notion: the symmetry between records and signals as existing in space-time and energy-matter respectively:
Signals act to transmit an encoded symbolic message from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time to a receiver possibly resulting in a record.
Records act to write an encoded symbolic message from a writer across time through a substrate by variations in matter over space to a reader possibly resulting a signal.
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106388529488243431.)
