Slashdot Mirror
Left-Handed Nuclei?
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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
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.
How gauche.
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..."