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Left-Handed Nuclei?

Posted by Hemos on from the interesting-idea dept.

joecool12321 writes "In this article at Scientific American we find that professor Stefan Frauendorf of Notre Dame has good news for lefties: he's found evidence of the long-sought left handed nuclei."

8 comments

  1. Hmm, by sane? · · Score: 1
    Sinister !

    [sound of English wooshing over 90% of /. readership]

    1. Re:Hmm, by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 1
      LOL! Yeah, but the other 10% love it!

      --
      If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
    2. Re:Hmm, by Bearpaw · · Score: 2

      How gauche.

  2. Re:Yawn... by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 1
    And I suspect that we'll eventually find that half the nuclei are naturally left-handed and half are naturally right-handed. Heck, we'll probably find they flop back and forth, left to right and back again. Just as we found that cave men made Buckyballs a few thousand years ago and nature made a nuclear reactor in South Africa a few hundred thousand years ago.

    OK, so it is News for Nerds. But I still say it isn't Stuff that Matters.

    --
    If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
  3. Yawn... by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 1
    What use is this? Talk about esoteric. If it helps us get closer to a Unified Theory, OK, I'm all for it. If it gets us closer to practical Fusion Power, I'm all for it. The article doesn't say what we can do with this knowledge.

    AFAICT "left-handed" nuclei do not make for "left-handed" atoms; the atoms behave the same, right? The interaction is at the electron level, not between the nuclei. H2O with left-handed O is still water (but left-handed H would be a neat trick :-)

    This may be News for Nerds, but does it matter?

    --
    If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
    1. Re:Yawn... by stevelinton · · Score: 2

      Just as understanding the electromagnetic properties of electrons (which we do pretty well) does not let us immediately understand all of chemistry (which is basically just an application of the EM properties of electrons), so even a complete understanding of quantum chomodynamics will not let us instantly understand all the properties of nuclei. On the other hand, if our partial understanding of QCD makes a prediction, which we can then verify, then we make progress with QCD, and the better our understanding of QCD the closer we come to understanding how it can interact with gravity, which is the unified field theory you wanted.

      By the way, I suspect the left-handed nuclei are wildly unstable states (so are the right-handed ones) so making molecules containing them is proabably not feasible

    2. Re:Yawn... by Schwarzchild · · Score: 2
      I don't think we do know whether or not this affects matter. It might change the properties of matter that contains left-handed nuclei.

      What if a left-handed version of H20 was created that acted like the ice-nine in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle . Ice-nine in the novel was supposed to "freeze" regular water on contact regardless of the temperature.

      You'd think that the oblong nucleus of left-handed nuclei would cause the orbits of any electrons to go out of kilter?

      --

      "sweet dreams are made of this..."

  4. Some of us are actually *interested* in this... by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 2

    What use is this? Talk about esoteric. If it helps us get closer to a Unified Theory, OK, I'm all for it. If it gets us closer to practical Fusion Power, I'm all for it. The article doesn't say what we can do with this knowledge.

    Why does that make this any less interesting?

    If you want the pedantic argument, then yes, this does bring us closer to fusion power by improving our understanding of nuclear forces and giving us new data points to test our models with, but that's secondary.