this video is brought to you by brilliant hi welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion when was the last time you used a CD or went to a physical music store remember flipping through the rows of shiny discs finding your favorite album or discovering something new unwrapping a new CD popping it into your player and hearing that crisp clean sound for the first time was a unique experience but when you think about it compact discs were actually pretty cool a laser scanning a spinning disc to read stored information delivering perfect quality music or files for something conceived in the 1970s compact discs were pretty futuristic of course with flash storage and now streaming and cloud storage those colorful discs are now the dinosaurs of Technology but what if I told you that CDs could still be the future incredibly researchers have made a breakthrough they've developed a 3D optical disc with a staggering 1.6 pits of storage capacity that's over 200,000 DV d s on a single disc so today we'll explore this incredible research and the unlikely Return of the compact disc how does it work will this ever see the light of day it is exciting but towards the end of the episode I'll get to the drawbacks as always but before all of that we'll take a fun trip down memory lane and delve briefly into the history of CDs it's quite an interesting story so let's jump into [Music] it you are watching C Fusion TV [Music] the CD's Journey began in the late 1970s when Phillips was working on video disc technology this was inspired by the emerging technology of lasers that could read data without contact research on video discs started all the way back in 1957 but it wasn't until the late '70s where Laser Technology became practical although it was ahead of its time the video disc project failed as the public ultimately weren't that interested I've done a full episode on laser discs if you're interested in that story but it wasn't the end Phillips saw an opportunity for using laser reading technology in the audio Market final records and tapes dominated at the time but they both had their limitations vinyl require delicate turntables prone to skipping while cassettes though portable and re-recordable lacked the character of vinyl audio and tended to degrade with repeated use Phillips aimed to create a smaller more portable disc that could hold at least an eror of music after years of research they developed audio longplay or Alp an audio disc system interestingly they initially considered quadrophonic sound an early form of surround sound but abandoned it due to size limitations the name compact disc was chosen to evoke the success of the compact cassette in March 1979 Phillips showcased the CD's audio quality however they lacked expertise in digital audio recording a crucial missing piece engineers at Phillips didn't know how to convert heard analog sound into digital that have to turn to Japan to solve that problem in Japan Sony was a master of digital audio circuitry with over a decade of experience refining the encoding of sound waves into digital signals however they lacked the expertise to create a physical compact disc this is where Phillips and Sony converged the result was genius Philips Engineers figured out how the laser could zoom past time etched pits etched into the disc surface and turned that into ones and zeros while Sony Specialists focused on the analog to digital circuitry also creating an error correcting code to maintain that pristine audio I remember reading about this in an encyclopedia when I was about 12 and I was amazed at how it worked anyway in 1980 Phillips and Sony produced The Red Book establishing all the standards for compact discs from then on they work separately on their own C equipment but agreed to share components in the early stages in April of 1982 Phillips introduced the first ever production CD player the initial CDs were made in a plant in Hanover Germany debut titles included Abba's album The Visitors and a recording of Herbert von karajan conducting Richard strauss's the Alpine Symphony in October of 1982 Sony CDP 101 made its debut in Japan Jaan alongside the first run of CD albums led by Billy Joel's 52nd Street Sony's device was pricey around $2,300 in today's currency initially us record labels were skeptical about CDs but one year later 1,000 different titles were available in time the audio quality began to speak for itself in 1985 di Strait's album brothers and arms became the first CD to sell over a million copies and it Remains the world's most successful CD album by 1988 400 million CDs were produced by 50 pressing plants worldwide in the year 2000 Global CD sales peaked at 2.45 billion between 2000 and 2007 CD sales nearly halfed to 1.75 five billion and this was mainly due to file sharing and MP3 players and we all know the story from here ultimately the rise of streaming services and changing consumer preferences led to the decline of CDs by 2021 CD sales had dropped by 95% since their Peak currently at their lowest levels since 1986 major artists like Adele Taylor Swift and BTS caused a brief Resurgence of CD sales in 2021 but the overall trend remains very downward and the fall of music CDs took CD ROMs and other forms of optical media with it so it's pretty much done that's it it's certain CDs once dominated but now they just occupy a nostalgic corner or do they well as mentioned at the top of this episode the life of the CD may not be over so I was thrilled to see this recent paper in nature about a new optical storage method that could bring dis memory into the petabyte range petabytes that's 1,000 terabytes imagine having to store around 6 billion web pages so if you store this massive amount of data on 1 terabyte hard drive the device will cover the area about the size of an average playground but with this new technology the same amount of data can be stored in the device the size of a desktop computer researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology have developed a 3D optical disc with an astonishing capacity it can store up to 1.6 petabytes of data they published their study in nature and it's understandably caused a bit of a buzz so 1.6 pbits what is that that amount of data on a single optical disc is amazing but without context it's just a number so let's break it down let's compare it to the current champion of storage the exod drive Eed ct100 is currently the largest solid state drive available it offers a staggering 100 tab of storage capacity but the price well it's jaw-dropping $40,000 or $400 per terabyte and you thought Apple was bad but the thing is to put that into perspective a 100 terab is enough space for approximately 20 million songs 20,000 HD movies or 2,000 standard iPhones worth of data well that is a lot well this disc has even more capacity 1.6 pedits is equivalent to 200 terab or 200,000 GB the craziest thing is this new disc is about the same size as as a normal DVD but holds 4,000 times as much as a Blu-ray okay so you must be asking how did the researchers do it here's a simplified and brief explanation of it the secret behind this massive storage lies in layers traditional Optical discs like CDs or DVDs typically have one or two layers to store data sometimes they can go up to four but this new disc is like a skyscraper with 100 Floors each layer holding precious information by stacking these layers the researchers have crammed in more data than ever before next ultr transparent materials and nanoscale spots to achieve this feat they used Advanced Materials that allows light to pass through with minimal scattering now imagine tiny spots microscopic dots on each layer these spots are where the magic happens researchers created a new material called aggregation induced emission di doped photoresist or a i e ddpr for short it's a fancy and quite a mouthful of a term but think of these spots as data pixels the interesting thing here is that they're smaller than the wavelengths of visible light this was a limitation of traditional optical storage but now with this method they can record data in sections as small as 1/10th the wavelength of visible light this allows for the encoding of data on those 100 layers it's like writing with a super fine pen on an atomic scale so how do you write data onto this disc well it's like orchestrating a laser ballet a green laser triggers spot formation it's like a conductor raising the battern then a red laser steps in and switches off the writing process by controlling the timing they made the spots smaller than the waves of light themselves it's akin to Precision Machining with light on a nanoc scale to read the data they employed another laser Duo a blue beam makes the spots glow then an orange light turns off the glove and with that the data is revealed according to the researchers their disk with 100 layers spaced just a micrometer apart can read and write data very accurately to give you some imagery of the accuracy here's a demonstration of some layers being written on and remember the scale is 5 micromet but the journey to get here has been long and arduous Professor mingu who led the research explains how challenging it was over the last 10 years to find the perfect materials that could both handle reading and writing data in such a small space the plus side is manufacturing a disc is also easy it takes about 6 minutes per disc and it uses a similar method for those used in [Music] DVDs these new Ultra high-capacity discs are well suited for data centers these diss could enable data centers to store exabytes of data in a much smaller physical space than current Technologies think a billion gbits of storage in a room instead of a stadium also Optical discs are known for their longevity and durability so this makes them ideal for long-term archival storage they're portable and also robust against electromagnetic interference so this makes it suitable for safeguarding critical data but of course now the moment you've all been waiting for the downsides and limitations while the new Optical discs hold a lot of promise there are some severe limitations and challenges to consider so obviously there's market adoption apart from niche market segments like data storage and archival storage using physical media will be a tough sell everyone's already used to cloud storage and streaming services they're not going to want to give up their convenience physical media is just an extra step and added friction and next we come to one of the biggest issues current prototypes have major limitations in terms of writing speed and efficiency the estimated energy consumption would be in the kilowatt range per terabyte of writing and the right speed is only megabytes per second researchers are working on improving these aspects but who knows how long that's going to take and next next we have the cost a fosc laser similar to one of the ones used in the setup costs almost $50,000 and needs fans from an AC outlet now that is a showstopper if I've ever seen one lasers etching data on a nano scale really is amazing isn't it science as a whole is amazing but it can be overwhelming to understand well fortunately there's a fun and easy way to learn about it with brilliant.org brilliant is where you can learn by doing with thousands of interactive lessons in maths s science data analytics programming and AI their course on scientific thinking is a great place to start each lesson on brilliant allows you to play with Concepts a method proven to be six times more effective than watching lecture videos plus all content on brilliant is crafted by teachers researchers and professionals from MIT Caltech Duke Microsoft Google and more learn at your own pace to brush up on a project for work or just for your own self-development you can try everything that brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org coldfusion or click on the link in the description you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription thanks now back to the [Music] video so in conclusion it seems like CDs wouldn't be making a comeback for the average consumer anytime soon but with such large amounts of storage in such a small medium there could be new uses for this technology perhaps data Sensers of the future we'll be using pedit CDs But ultimately realistically in the grand scheme of things research is research and for those of us interested in The Cutting Edge it's very cool to gwk over such Solutions but the reality is this will take many years to become a product if ever but I could be wrong and maybe the researchers will continue to refine the technology until it becomes commercially viable and the market responds positively but anyway what are your thoughts on this would you like to use such a beeroth of an optical disc format let me know in the comment section below so that is the story of the compact disc and its surprising possible fature okay so my name is toogo and you've been watching cold fusion and I'll catch you again soon for the next episode if you did like this video feel free to subscribe to Cold Fusion all right cheers guys have a good one [Music] [Music] cold fusion it's new thinking