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Nearly a century ago, in 1905, a young man of 25 years of age stood up and told the world that Sir Isaac Newton had not got the whole story right. Well, quite predictably, the establishment of the day ignored the young man and many reprimanded him for stepping out of line.As it happened the young man was right, but it took years for evidence to build up to indicate that he actually was right. The young fellow’s name was Albert Einstein.He had some thinking time at that age; he was a patents clerk and one imagines that he could sit and ponder alone without business meetings clogging his day. Incidentally he was the guy who signed the patent for Toblerone chocolate.Many people did not want to listen to Einstein because he was young and was bucking the system, but, let’s face it, many people did not want to listen to him because they did not understand what the heck he was talking about. He admitted a few times that he did not understand his own discoveries himself – his maths calculations seemed to produce such odd predictions of reality that Al wondered if the maths was indicating something other than reality.Who could blame him? The oddness has turned out to be odder than even he could imagine. I frequently wonder what on earth (oops, should maybe say; ‘what in the universe’) will become reality in only a few years time.Now what has happened is that scientists have been able to catch laser light in a box. Physicists at Harvard University have shone a laser beam into a glass cell filled with atomic vapours. The light went in but it did not come out. The laser pulse was kilometres long, but the glass cell was only a few centimetres in size.Einstein told us that the speed of light is the fastest speed that there is, and that nothing can exceed it. In fact in the maths if you put in a legit minus sign at one place it tells you (again legit) that if you were to go faster than light then time would run backwards and you would go back in time. That is where all the time machines come from in the Hollywood movies, from Einstein’s minus sign.But back to real reality; light does slow down in water, honey or any other medium that is transparent. How on earth (oops ‘in the universe’) can the light tell the difference between glass and, say, steel when it arrives at the material’s surface . . . well think about it. When the light slows down in water one can calculate the refractive index from this speed change, and so figure out why a stick appears to bend when you dip it in a pool. So the light slows down a tad in the glass cell full of rubidium or sodium gas, and gets to interact with the atoms.Now another point: like a child’s top, atoms spin, either clockwise or anticlockwise if you look down on them, and physicists call this upspin or downspin, meaning that if you turn a screw clockwise it goes down into the wood, but comes up if you turn it anticlockwise. Pssst, atoms don’t really spin, they possess angular momentum, but we call it spin. Anyway what happened in the glass cell is that the kilometre-long light beam went into the box, like a contortionist, and coded the atoms for up and down, so it imprinted its signal in the atom spin picture.It turns out that getting the laser pulse out again is quite easy; you merely send in another laser beam and, like cutting a taut elastic band, twang, the stored laser light jumps out. All sorts of mind-boggling ideas now spring up, like coding information into atoms and ‘mapping’ this on to another planet, say, then you release it on the other planet when you feel like it. This has been dubbed quantum communication.These ideas may raise eyebrows, unless of course you are a fan of Star Trek in which case you have heard it all before.These quantum techniques may also be used in futuristic quantum computing machines.The point that I want to make from all this is that, in the next ten years, or next five years, changes and devices will come about that we cannot imagine now, and our lives will change again just as they did when cellphones arrived and when the Internet arrived.One thing we can predict with certainty is that the future is going to be even more unpredictable than it is now.