I think it's basically a tiny beam of light being fired through a tiny stencil, and the light that survives through the stencil is the data (like what would happen if you painted over a stencil on a sheet of paper, the paint only reaches the paper in the areas where the stencil has holes) and then the cesium gas does stuff to it which makes it be able to be used for storage.
Mank- your explanation sounds fine on a macroscopic (ie, "big") level, but you're oversimplifying. It'd be a bit like painting over a stencil but only using one atom of paint- you can't permanently change the shape of an atom so whatever your stencil looks like you'll end up with a single spherical atom when you take it away.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it isn't like that atall on a microscopic level because of the wave-particle duality of light. I'm more engineer than physicist, but Foof's "working backwards" idea and David's "Young's slits" analogy seem plausible to me.
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I think it's basically a tiny beam of light being fired through a tiny stencil, and the light that survives through the stencil is the data (like what would happen if you painted over a stencil on a sheet of paper, the paint only reaches the paper in the areas where the stencil has holes) and then the cesium gas does stuff to it which makes it be able to be used for storage.
Mank- your explanation sounds fine on a macroscopic (ie, "big") level, but you're oversimplifying. It'd be a bit like painting over a stencil but only using one atom of paint- you can't permanently change the shape of an atom so whatever your stencil looks like you'll end up with a single spherical atom when you take it away.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it isn't like that atall on a microscopic level because of the wave-particle duality of light. I'm more engineer than physicist, but Foof's "working backwards" idea and David's "Young's slits" analogy seem plausible to me.