Canon PowerShot A410
ƒ/2.8
5.4 mm
1/640
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
(Edit: Photo is Copyright by D-Wave Systems)
77 responses to “What’s That? (71)”
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Don’t know what it is but impatient to know about it – looks way too cool.
P.S. If I were drunk, I’d say it’s an inner ear of the next generation’s robot 😉 -
Hm. There’s only three reasons I can think of for the cylindrical construction: either something goes inside, or the whole thing spins around, or there’s some RF property it’s taking advantage of.
Seeing lots of coils in there also suggests RF to me. It’s also highly parallelized- lots of identical or almost identical units. I also suspect those white wires through the outside go to antennas.
Also, the only place I’ve ever seen this kind of construction before is in a satellite. I’m going to have to go with something like a multiband RF filter bank.. possibly for a satellite. -
Determines the angle of rotation. Might be from a robot or from something like a bank vault combination mechanism.
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Looks like some sort of Cold-War era weapon or optic array. The style of construction on the electrical circuits looks sort-of antiquated.
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This is a very intriguing device. The kind I’d have to take apart immediately 😉 My bet: Machining is too precise to be old. Circuits look RF related and maybe surface mount. All the coils seem to be about the same number of windings and in the same orientation (or very slightly different from each other)…taking the opera house clue, I’d guess this is the receiving end of a very large RF gathering device designed to listen to many discrete frequencies simultaneously & continuously…perfect for SETI-type applications…So, lets say: a super parallel RF receiver ready to go into space as part of a new probe/satellite…or maybe its a spy satellite receiver designed to be aimed at earth and listen to hundreds of bands in parallel…
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I would say it is a component used to create or capture radio waves for a holographic imaging scanner.
woof!
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ooh…. so many cool ideas here….
R80o: speaking of cool, it is built into a "massive heat sink" as you say.
sbove: I like the way you think. So as not to mislead, let me say that that the opera house comparison was just a visual search application. Yes, it is very "new"… And "super parallel"… And way cooler than space. =)
AMagill has the closest guess so far with a "RF filter bank"… That part is correct, but the application is the opposite of an antenna… I’d say you get a partial bingo… but we are still missing the soul of this new machine….
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My guess is that it is a super electro-magnet, or something that accellerates particles.
If it is the opposite of "antenna" (which is something that recieves electromagnetic wave information), then it is sends out EM wave information.
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The question is, what is going to be attached at these inwards pointing solder pads? My guess: It’s a liquid He cooled detector for particle physics.
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..it would be .ice if it were some internal low tech basics for the new device for the front line thinking maybe steve’s in there.. so it has some remarkable rationale – not a partical accelerator then.. I’m flumoxed 🙂
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It must be cryogenic in nature. We’re not seeing all the parts either since the solder pads are exposed, something else slides in and connects. I think it is a particle or electron guide that electromagnets powered by the circuit boards cause to move in parallel beams and are adjusted in their path by said magnets prior to exiting the chamber. That would make it not too different than a TV tube.
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Smth to do with cold fusion (e.g. particle accelerator)?
Or smth to do with laser weapons?
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Ohoh! Multiple frequencies and receiving… How about a cell phone tower receiver set? Or maybe a multiple channel receiver in an AWAX plane? Both those benefit from high sensitivity, and I’m with The rocketeer, cryogenic makes sense.. the heat sink is probably to keep things cold not hot, since this not high power circuitry.
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Hmm, no detector – maybe it’s an amplifier with Squid technology and cooled to 1°K (it does not look like mK)
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So it’s a superconducting interferometer?
When the loop is coupled to a detection coil, the divergence of the kinetic inductance makes very weak magnetic measurements possible. The optimum is a function of the electromagnetic and thermal parameters.
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How about a Super Parallel Magnetic Resonance Microscope? Such a device would possibly be capable of resolving images at the molecular level… DNA for example… which could be akin to a soul.
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Sorry, biotron… an unintended consequence of rephrasing. Hope you’ll recover OK…
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How about some Cray xx-like element ?
I mean a simple computer, highly parallel, low temperature, probable birth place for friendly AI!If so, where is(are) the screen(s) ?
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Ok, we’ve got super-low-noise RF-filters … maybe it is one of these devices to map the bio-magnetic fields of the human brain (bringing SQUIDS and soul into play 😉 )
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RF-photonic receiver or a WiMAX modulator for wireless data comm?
On the second (sixth) thought – High Temperature Super Conducting (HTSC) RF filters for cellular base stations?
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Bingo (1/√2)(|.schtieF>|AMagill>+|AMagill>|.schtieF>), a newly coupled winner !!! This is part of a new quantum computer.
(and a special shout out to Mighty Aphrodite, because he was darn close…)
BenODen nailed the literary reference… We needed Physics and Poets for this Puzzler…
Here you see an array of 128 lumped element filters, one for each input line. The space is constrained because the filters and wires need to fit into the dilution fridge cylinder. The filters remove noise and crosstalk (opposite of an antenna) from the signals that drop down to the heart of a new quantum computer, cooled to 0.005 degrees above absolute zero… about 500x colder than the coldest place in remote outer space.
So in a way, the filter block is an electronic interface between our world and the quantum entangled world. It comes from the quantum computer that the Canadians at D-Wave Systems plan to unveil on Feb 13…
This quantum computer employs the resources of 65,536 parallel universes to compute answers in a fundamentally new way.
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