
Ultrafast laser pulse makes desktop black hole glow - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/09/ultrafast-laser-pulse-makes-desktop-black-hole-glow.ars
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mechanical_fish
This looks like it might be awesome work.

My only complaint is that, once again, physicists have been unable to resist
the sexy-but-misleading metaphors when coining popular names. Calling this
refractive index perturbation a "desktop black hole" is perhaps even worse
than the previous grand champion of popular confusion, "quantum
teleportation". Thousands of hours are going to be wasted explaining to
laypeople that, no, these things are _not_ tiny black holes and they will not
pull in increasing amounts of matter, Katamari style, until they consume your
local college campus and begin to threaten your entire state.

I miss Murray Gell-Mann's naming schemes. The beauty of the word _quark_ is
that it wasn't already taken by some other thing. Or could we go back to
acronyms? MACHOs and WIMPs were hilarious.

