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A New Spin On Physical Phenomena

Posted by michael on from the give-it-a-whirl dept.

f00Dave writes "Researchers have discovered "a new physical phenomenon, electrostatic rotation, that, in the absence of friction, leads to spin". I'm a bit skeptical about the implied relationship between physical "spin" (as in rotation) and quantum "spin", however. Still, this is the sort of scientific advance that renews my faith in the system. Go nerds! =]"

12 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. already done? by EvilStein · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hey, isn't that where they stick a piece of buttered toast to the back of a cat and let it rip?

    I never could get that working. My damn cat always ate the toast.. the fat bastard.

    1. Re:already done? by Syncroswitch · · Score: 5, Funny

      After you tape the toast to the cat, you have to seal it in a blackbox, flip the box over, the cat will be suspended by the conflicted laws of phsics. unfortunetly you cannot observe it, as soon as you open the box, the cat will have eaten the toast. an interesting note, while the cat is in the box, and unobserved, he knows the correct keys to all possible encryptions. Dont tell the humane society OK...

  2. No more friction? by AntiGenX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm more excited about the "absence of friction" part...
    At last my dream of building a perpetual motion machine can be realized. Take that thermodynamics!

  3. Equipment used by Hayzeus · · Score: 4, Funny
    The cool thing about all of this was the relatively simple equipment used: three metal balls (I'm guessing Christmas tree ornaments), and a little thin wire.

    This gives me renewed hope for my latest project, a hyperdrive engine built of old Spaghetti-Os cans and dental floss.

    --

    Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
  4. Renewed faith? by jgalun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't understand this submission:

    I'm a bit skeptical about the implied relationship between physical "spin" (as in rotation) and quantum "spin", however. Still, this is the sort of scientific advance that renews my faith in the system.

    What system are we talking about? Why does faith need to be renewed in it? What, have you lost faith in physics because it doesn't discover new laws every day?

  5. Re:Sponataneous Spinning? by feepness · · Score: 5, Funny

    Where is the energy coming from?

    It said the experiment taps the unlimited potential energy source of those who have the ability to post within seconds of a headline appearing without actually reading the article.

    By their estimates, this should be enough to power mankind for the foreseeable future.

  6. Re:Output? by pVoid · · Score: 4, Interesting
    No friction basically means that the force being observed is quite small...

    You have to understand that article was first translated from scientific talk to reporting talk, and now it's being translated back to /. nerd talk... (which isn't scientific talk btw).

    An example is how they first found the value of the constant of gravity. They put two humoungous iron balls near eachother, and noted the very tiny torque they induced just by being near each other.

    The fact that the observed effects were tiny doesn't mean they don't exist.

  7. Re:Cool, but what is the practical application? by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe that's the cool thing about scientific curiosity - the things you discover don't have to have commercial value in order to be discovered.

    Consider this: when it was determined that a current flowing in a wire produces a magnetic field, or when Faraday discovered that moving a magnet near a wire or coil of wire can produce a voltage, I'm sure a lot of people said, "but seriously, what would this be used for?" And they probably said the same thing about countless other things that were discovered in situations where the effect was so small that they had no apparent use.

    Of course now we look back and say, "what a dumb question! How could they now know these things could be useful?" And maybe 200 years from now somebody will look at this archived announcement on Slashdot and say the same.

    Then again, maybe this will turn out to be a misinterpretation of the experimental observation. Time will tell...

    --
    [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
  8. the real article by awaspaas · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's the journal article from Applied Physics Letters

    1. Re:the real article by zCyl · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or here if you don't like pdf's.

      The article shows much more clearly than the pop news release that the rotation has nothing to do with quantum spin, and is entirely a classical electrostatic phenomenon. I will try to translate the article briefly:

      Essentially, when you apply a charge to the first of the three metal spheres, the charges all repel each other and go to the outside of the first sphere. This exerts a repulsive force against the like charges on the other two spheres, causing an imbalance as more charges are pushed to the far side of the spheres (from the first one) than are on the close side of the spheres. Then, because the second and third spheres have an imbalanced charge distribution, they also exert forces on each other which further displace the charges.

      The displaced charges result in a potential which isn't perfectly balanced like two spheres would be, and the resulting calculation shows an interaction proportional to 1/(r^6), where r is the separation distance, which yields a rotation.

  9. Re:Cool, but what is the practical application? by f00Dave · · Score: 4, Funny

    Aprocryphal story related to me by my academic advisor:

    William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was invited to witness a demonstration of Faraday's electrical equipment. Gladstone asked, "This is quite interesting, Faraday, but of what practical worth is it?" Faraday replied, "One day, sir, you may tax it."

    --
    .f00Dave
  10. APS article by imkonen · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think this is an example of an overly-zealous press release from a university employee trying to make it sound more exciting than it is. The actual article (+ errata) by the researchers can be found at
    http://ojps.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?p rog=normal&id=APPLAB000080000015002800000001&idtyp e=cvips&gifs=yes
    Sorry, if you aren't browsing from an institution that subscribes to Applied Physics Letters, you probably won't be able to download the article for free. But I'll be happy to paraphrase what I understood from the article:

    This phenomenon was purely predictable from Coulomb's law and Gauss's laws of electrostatic attraction/repulsion. Many of you should have learned about these in freshman physics. The spheres were arranged in an assymetric pattern, so rotation isn't breaking any kind of symmetry. If you arranged their spherical balls in a mirror image pattern, the rotation will reverse. The authors aren't trying to say they measured some kind of new mystical force that hasn't already been understood for 100's of years but simply that there could be an engineering application that no one had thought of before.

    I'm inclined to agree with the original poster's comment that this has nothing to do with quantum mechanical spin.