Quantum Materials Corp. (fka QTMM)

[FreeGrass]

Quantum Dots and Brown Fields

Marvin Wolf is a regular satirical columnist for Local Talk News.

I used to be pretty smart. I went to a famous science and math high school. I got honors in college. Most of my friends think I’m pretty brilliant. But the truth these days is, I’m a caveman in an astronaut world.

It’s not all my fault. Back when I was in school, all we really knew about the atom was it was made up of the proton, neutron and electron. That’s it. Quantum physics was still mostly theoretical. Quarks had not yet been discovered, nor the gluon. I remember masers - they came before the laser - before “Goldfinger.” Still, I considered myself competent. They had this new device, the video tape recorder, and I was one of the few people who had one whose display actually displayed the correct time, instead of an eternally blinking 12:00 sign. I could even program the timer on the device to record a television show when I wasn’t there. That put me in the upper one percentile when it came to brains in my neighborhood. Hooray for me.

I even knew some jokes for geniuses. A traffic cop stops Heisenberg for speeding. The cop asks Heisenberg, “Do you know how fast you were going?” Heisenberg responds, “No, but I know where I am.” You might have to read up on the uncertainty principle to understand the punchline, but take it from me - among the cognoscenti, it’s pretty funny.

Not any more. I’m now reading about quantum dots, dark matter and graphene films and scratching my head in puzzlement.

So, what’s a quantum dot? I can’t really explain it in plain English, which is a good sign I don’t really understand it. I’ll try. As best I can make out, it’s a glowing semiconductor crystal where the color properties depend on the size of the crystal rather than the material of which it is made. Is that clear? No. I didn’t think so, and that’s the problem. I don’t see what’s quantum about it. The results seem certain rather than uncertain. A certain size equals a certain color. Nothing uncertain about that.

I do know quantum dots are the next big thing. For reasons I don’t understand, they have a lot of uses. They can increase internet bandwidth, they can make solar cells more efficient, they can be used in all sorts of sensors, and even read DNA. So it’s important, whatever it is and however it works. They can be used as a qubit in quantum computing. Okay, what’s a qubit? I think that’s a quantum bit, sort of like bits and bytes in regular computing but with a quantum computer. What’s a quantum computer? That’s a computer where you know where it is but you don’t know how fast it’s going, right? See, I’m getting confused again.

For simplification purposes, basically in the future instead of making displays out of light emitting diodes (LEDs), they’ll make them out of quantum dots. These are smaller than LEDs, so your TV will have quantum dots on the screen, and the recorder will have quantum dots on the display. So, in the future, when your high end Blue Ray HD DVD player endlessly blinks 12:00, at least you’ll know there’s more advanced technology in it.

On to brown fields. That I can explain. A brown field is brown because there’s crap in it - toxic stuff in it that makes it polluted, so people can’t live there. The politicians asked themselves, “How can we hide that? I know, solar cells!” That’s right, someone decided to put together clean energy and dirty land. Where else to put up solar cells but on the dirty land?

There’s a project to do that now in New Jersey - the largest project in the United States. With 10,000 contaminated brown field sites in New Jersey, it’s cheaper than making the land clean again. The dirtier the site, the more likely you’ll end up seeing solar panels there. It’s like putting a new dress on a hooker with AIDS - see how pretty she looks now? Problem solved, right?

I guess I’m not the only dummy out there. At least, I’m pretty certain about that.