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The Plastic Fractal Magnet
bedessen writes "An article at NewsFactor summarizes the developments in new plastics that exhibit magnetic fields of fractal dimensions. Whereas a simple bar magnet produces magnetic fields that go from the north pole to the south pole, the fields of the new hybrid plastic sprout like branches of a cactus lined with secondary fields that resemble needles. As these fields become increasingly interlocked, they exhibit a unique kind of order. This intensely ordered structure might one day be key to storing information with a very high density. The researchers behind this are Arthur Epstein, director of the Center for Materials Research at Ohio State University, and Joel Miller, a professor of chemistry at the University of Utah. There's also this PDF overview of the subject, which is quite technical but still readable."
This new fractal magnet will allow my flux-capacitor to send this message BACK IN TIME... to get first post! .....
Great Scott!
Is there any news on actual practical applications of these new magnets we've been hearing about? BTW... Discover Magazine had an article on Carbon magnets, quite interesting, because carbon is not *supposed* to be magnetic. Link here. Just my comments...
Kill me.
Am I the only one having problems understanding that article? I'm not a physicist, but I didn't think anything could exist in less than one dimension. Freaky.
Sex - Find It
Something else that i don't understand that will change my life forever.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
The article, in its initial description of fratal geometry, cited this comparison: where a rectangluar prism has volume of length times width times height , a snowflake has a volume that is fractal in nature. The article went on to say that while the rectangular prism's volume is three-dimensional, the volume of the snowflake, being fractal, was fractionally dimensional (i.e. 1/2d or 0.8d or something, instead of 3d).
My question: if you were to find a huge snowflake, and melt it down, and measure that water in a graduate, wouldn't you find its volume? And wouldn't that volume be 3d? How does its volume, assuming it remains constant, change from being 1/2d or whatever to 3d? Sorry if I sound ignorant, but fractal mathematics is a little beyond me.
I guess the applications for this are pretty big...
I mean you could have a harddrive that not only gets corrupt when you leave it in the sun (as you do..) but it can melt too.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
The plastic ultimately stabilized in 1.6 dimensions at a temperature of minus 269 degrees Celsius (minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit).
What kind of uses exist for superconductors at these temperatures? This seems like an overoptimistic article about a non-technology.
The solution that has worked best for me...is to avoid public discussion. -- CmdrTaco
Plastics make it possible =)
as fragile as a dvd, as corruptable as a floppy disk, and as portable as a hard disk? Honestly, why would I want to use this? Will I be able to afford its super-high density? Hard disks haven't evolved in more than a decade for a reason!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
From the article
The plastic ultimately stabilized in 1.6 dimensions at a temperature of minus 269 degrees Celsius (minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit).
It would be nice if someone came up with a chart that plotted the correlation between the temperature necessary in the lab and the temperature necessary to bring the item to market for a significant number of products. Because I'm willing to bet that -249 C is pretty close to the Don't Hold Your Breath mark.
My
Limekiller
I'd like to get away from magnetic storage as a temporary removable storage device... The last time the floor waxer zamboni zipped past my locker I lost my college programming project... not to mention the number of VHS tapes that are useless now... am I alone in this?
From the article:
The plastic ultimately stabilized in 1.6 dimensions at a temperature of minus 269 degrees Celsius (minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit).
I'd be happy if my girlfriend would stabilize in three dimensions at room temperature.
How long do you think it'll take for them to figure that one out?
My
Limekiller
It raises an interesting possibility - with a new way of forming high density magnetic fields I wonder if we'll see a return to Megneto Optical media or weather the two will stay seperate..
It'd certainly be interesting to get more storage out of yer cd sized media if you could use the plastics as a storage medium as well as the optical layer..
Maybe its a crazy idea..
Somebody will probably take this idea and ger rich off it none the less
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
that'll be Here then...
From the pdf link: Perhaps its all about the ordering (which could be due to the geometry of the molecular structure).
Note: the pdf file also states (towards the end):Its interesting that where we are looking at is (I think, perhaps) a non-bulk form of magnetism, and the statement is perhaps overstating a requirement.
Of the pdf file
(In typical google-htmlized pdf style)
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
I think science would be a more relevant topic for this one. Interesting, tho.
- Matthieu
is november 2000... kinda old...?
Is here
Among other results it is shown that Great Britain's coastline has a fractal dimension of 1.24, while that of South Africa is very nearly 1.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Doesnt this therefore introduce the need for a (quantum like) million bits error correction per one bit problem?
about as clear as mud.
The needles of the cactus sprout like magnet field lines!
Thank you.. thank you very much.
I'm so used to coming home from the bars and getting very basic "here's an update to this" or "here's a new apache module" from slashdot.
:)
But when I come home at 5 in the morning, not quite so sober, and you're talking about half dimensions? That's just not nice.... What the hell am I supposed to wrap my brain around? If it's only half dimensional, does that mean I only have to wrap just my left lobe around it? I'm sooooooo lost....
They had enough fun with plain ol' obloidish magnetic field calculations. Can you imagine the math once we start throwing in fractals?
May we never see th
There is nothing in the article that I could see but I wonder what the coastline of a scandinavian country like Norway would be compared to Great Britain? All those Fjords...
Imagine a Beowold cluster of these!
Fiesta bowl ownership and magnets.
Just a question from a guy who appreciates fractals for their artistry -- and can program a mandelbrot set -- but really doesn't understand the math.
How, exactly, do you calculate that something has 1.6 dimensions? Or is this something you measure?
I actually can visualize 2.9976 dimensions: just use as your spatial grid an interaction of very reactive particles that require 3 charges, and much less reactive particles that require 2 charges --
but I don't see how you'd calculate or measure this kind of thing in real life.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
But , here's a alternate pdf location.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
I predict that it'll do wonders for the liquid nitrogen cooled wallet market.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This leads to history dependent M(H) magnetic behavior (hysteresis)
That is: Stateful.
Whereas a simple bar magnet produces magnetic fields that go from the north pole to the south pole, the fields of the new hybrid plastic sprout like branches of a cactus lined with secondary fields that resemble needles
Shouldn't the headline have been "Maxwell's equations disproven!" or something else more fitting for such a revolutionary discovery?
Unless of course Maxwell's equations still stand, in which case the headline should have been something like "Hype replaces progress in science; film at 11:00"
-- MarkusQ
I don't see how this could be used to store data. The article doesn't really describe this. I thought the structure of a fractal was sort of "predetermined" by only a few variables. Like the Mandelbrot set, for example. I suppose you could fiddle with those variables until you got a magnetic field that just "happens" to fit all your stored data, but that seems awfully inefficient. I guess I just don't understand.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
people have been using a magnetic field and charging it with positively charged ion's to make a magnetic shield against alpha/gamma radiation. Now, the implications of being able to use super light plastic magnets in a space enviroment sound very intriging...
"shields up"...
If the disjoint union of n disjoint copies of a fractal F makes a similar (in the geometric sense) one k times as big, then the fractal dimension of F is (log n)/(log k) = log base k of n.
This makes the fractal dimension of a square 2 because it takes four of them to make a square twice as big and log 4 / log 2 = 2. The fractal dimension of the Sierpinski Gasket is log 3 / log 2 because you can assemble 3 copies of it to get one twice as big.
The dimension of the Cantor set (that's the one where you start with the unit interval and remove the middle third of every line, or equivalently the numbers between 0 and 1, inclusive, whose base-3 expansion contains no 1s) is log 2 / log 3 which is less than 1.
The dimension of the rational points in a square is still 2, even though it has fewer points than the Cantor set. So, fractal dimensions are "freaky."
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
A square may have sides of 1 cm but if you were to try to actually measure the perimeter with that thread, you would have bumps around the atoms and molecules, which not only would make it hard to define exactly where the boundary is, but they also vibrate, meaning you could only measure a static square at absolute zero.
Infuriate left and right
According to my dictionary of Mathematics, a fractal is "a set with non-integral Hausdorff Dimension." The key word here is SET. These magnetic fields are not a mathematical set. In fact, magnetic fields are three-dimensional (check Maxwell's equations.) This is another typical case where the physicists don't know their maths.
Wow...
right.
I first learned about chaos theory, from James Gleick's excellent book 'Chaos' about ten years ago. I've been hooked ever since.
The thing that stuck in my head was Fiegenbaum's number 4.669, which BTW is irrational. This ratio is everywhere and most profound of all, is visible in the architecture of our bodies. The main artery from the heart called the Aorta, is like the trunk of a tree, point being is, if you measure the distance between the heart and the first bifurcation, divide that distance by 4.669, it gives you the statistical length of the two branches from the first bifurcation. Now here is the kicker:- it is that ratio, all the way down to the smallest cappillary, to enable a blood supply for every cell in our bodies.
GM technology worries me, not because I'm scared of engineering. But because to my knowledge, we do not yet understand the mathematics of morphogenesis. DNA is a simple four bit code and yet somehow or other, nature manages to store a cellular doubling number in that four bit code.
We all start out as one cell, that doubles in a binary progression. Our body plan is formed by the x,y,z matrics of those doublings. The fractal like architecture of our bodies, gives us a hint to how, the miracle of storing our entire code base, in about four gig might be acomplished.
This new discovery excites me, who knows where it will lead, a new understanding of life maybe? New math? New electronics? The list is endless.
Cutting edge indeed.
Peter
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
"A fractal is an object whose volume is not a simple product of its dimensions"
So, if you have a "perfect rectangular solid" of lead, and extract one atom from the corner, that leaves you with a fractal?
Once you are at the scale of discrete particle then there is no edge to measure, only the distance between the particles.
While you are there you could measure the distance between applied mathematics and pure mathematics.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
it will fall on the floor and smash.
Although I'd be too busy shivvering to notice
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
1. Invent new thing
2. Say it will increase storage.
3. ??
4. Prophet
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I can see the wonderful fun kids are going to have with these magnets and televisions now. No longer the simple purple-green circle. Now you can make really psychedelic stuff show up on your TV.
Fractals have "similar" structures at different scales. There is no real pattern, because the structures are different everywhere in the fractal. There is only almost-repetition. It is critical to distinguish between self-identity and self-simlarity. No two parts of a fractal will ever match regardless of how you scale them. However, the self-similarity, and also the minute structural differences continue to express themselves within infinitessimal portions of the fractal, scaled to infinity (so we can see them), at least as far as we know...
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Your sig:
That's true only if the opportunities to mod or post are equal. That seems to be true only around 8:30 CST/CDT. Mod and post on the same discussion are prohibited. The opportunity to mod is a rare thing, and it gives the moderator more influence (although with the all-too-easy click-click convenience) than a poster (who can affect the visibility of the thread only at +2 when sufficient karma has been earned).I believe the choice to moderate is an important one, and while I agree with your sentiment (I think...) that people who moderate without without knowing what they are doing should think harder about things, I don't think that differentiates moderation from posting replies.
Oh, which brings me to my point: it's easier to suggest that someone else make(or find) a chart instead of doing it yourself...
Note: the Slashdot "lameness filter" didn't like my ASCII art, but it apparently ignores journal entries...
is in my journal. Furthermore, Slashdot doesn't like hrefs from comments to a person's journal. The rules to this Slashdot game are neither simple nor obvious!--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
that my post was sarcastic!?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Funky fields.. mmmm Magic.
Eat at Joe's.
This intensely ordered structure might one day be key to storing information with a very high density.
Yea, who cares about this as helping us understand more and more about the quantum mechanics of our universe.... we get bigger hard drives for porn!
True, it is interesting that it could lead to bigger hard drives, but it annoys me when they post that as the "hot topic" of this new discovery.
and not just be a 1 2 3 4 profit attempt
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter