Re Charles Stross & C12/C13 isotope lattices: Cool! Did Charles Stross have any ideas about how to read out these data? Re adjacent C12/C13 swapping: in a quantum universe, never say "never". The probability & half-life of such swapping should be calculable. Perhaps it's 1000 years. Perhaps it's 1000 billion years. But I'd be interested in what the actual answer is. At 07:40 PM 6/1/2016, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
Credit where it's due. As far as I know, the idea of using C12 and C13 in diamond as bits to store information is due to Charles Stross. The earliest mention I've been able to find is in a July 2013 Usenet post from him. He later used the idea in his Hugo-award winning novella "Palimpsest," in which high-definition video recordings of literally all of history and prehistory in vast numbers of alternate timelines is recorded in a vast library which uses nearly all of Earth's carbon. ... Diamond is stable over at least billions of years, probably much longer. The rigid lattice means that adjacent atoms never swap.