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Scientists Create Supersolid From Helium
jabberjaw writes "Nature is reporting that Pennsylvania State University researchers Eun-Seong Kim and Moses Chan have created a 'supersolid' from helium-4. Although a crystalline solid, the supersolid can flow much like a liquid. This is due to the fact that the empty compartments in the crystal move coherently, thus waves can progress through the lattice. The supersolid state can be compared to the superfluid state. Perhaps a condensed matter physicist can dumb the article down for layfolk such as myself?"
Joyous helium
Becomes a supersolid
At low Celcius
But seriously, this stuff is really cool. What with the properties they described, I wonder if it could be useful in conducting electricity or forming a shock-absorbing barrier?
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
My dad did his PhD thesis on liquid helium 3. Apparently it's pretty difficult to contain the stuff, since even the tiniest opening in a container is enough for everything to escape at once (no viscosity)...
Next generation viagra additive?
Tom's hardware had an article several years ago that pointed to a group of Finns who used Liquid Helium to cool PIII cpus. Unfortunately while it's a fine, supercold well flowing liquid, it also doesn't take up all that much heat from what it's in contact with, and trying to seal liquid helium is well nigh impossible. It manages to leak quickly out gaps that wouldn't let any other substance through.
This is definitley intriguing, but I can't gather frmo the article if there are any uses that have been thought of for a super fluid like this. Although its inconvenient to make (have to cool it to near absolute zero then pressurize it quite a bit), I don't doubt some of you out there have some ideas about what any of this means besides "hey isn't that cool it swirls forever". Anyone?
Also, since it is inflammable
I think you mean nonflammable. Inflammable is the same as flammable.
I can soon expect 'Chunk-o-helium' for my high-pitched voice needs. Is this something I'm going to see next to 'Kit-Kat's in the store?
Dolemite
_________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Mmmmmm frozen. Is there any kind of practical application for helium-4 in this state?
"I'd be smart if I didn't let thinking get in the way."
Sure it could be. Here's the abstract from Eunsong Kim's talk about it two days ago at Penn State University, courtesy of our friend Google:
When liquid 4He is cooled below 2.176 K, it undergoes a phase transition--Bose-Einstein condensation--and becomes a superfluid with zero viscosity. Once in such a state, it can flow without dissipation even through pores of atomic dimensions. Although it is intuitive to associate superflow only with the liquid phase, it has been proposed theoretically that superflow can also occur in the solid phase of 4He. Owing to quantum mechanical fluctuations, delocalized vacancies and defects are expected to be present in crystalline solid 4He, even in the limit of zero temperature. These zero-point vacancies can in principle allow the appearance of superfluidity in the solid. However, in spite of many attempts, such a 'supersolid' phase has yet to be observed in bulk solid 4He. Here we report torsional oscillator measurements on solid helium confined in a porous medium, a configuration that is likely to be more heavily populated with vacancies than bulk helium. We find an abrupt drop in the rotational inertia of the confined solid below a certain critical temperature. The most likely interpretation of the inertia drop is entry into the supersolid phase. If confirmed, our results show that all three states of matter--gas, liquid and solid--can undergo Bose-Einstein condensation.
I heard about something like this a few years back, as I understood it then the thing is that at low enough temperatures atoms break down into a "soup" of protons, neutrons and electrons all behaving like a liquid.
It was a (Swedish) magazine article, so no links I'm afraid. Is this the same thing or entierly different?
.: Max Romantschuk
"Don't worry! Its inflammable!"
I just laid a supersolid one. Yeah I posted anon.
Go ahead and mod me down for being an idiot, but wouldn't it be great to use some kind of superliquids or supersolids in car engines and other mechanical devices? I imagine a liquid with no viscocity would be better for an engine than standard synthetic motor oil. I guess that whole temperature thing would kill it though... just a thought.
This is not the first new state of matter announced this week.
/. but keep forgetting password...
. ht ml
The New York Times reported a "color gass condensate" when gold ions were bombarded with relativistic deuterons. In this condition, nucleons and quarks blur into a jello of gluons.
There are MANY more states of matter than solid, liquid, and gas. There's plasma, 2-dimensional fluids, 1-dimensional crystals, ambiplasma of partcies and antiparticles, photon crystals, and lots of others.
This is the golden age of physics!
Professor Jonathan Vos Post
Woodbury University
have an accounton
BTW, check out my "Periodic Table of Mystery Writers" at
http://magicdragon.com/UltimateMystery/periodic
rollovers and click to 100+ pages...
Glass flows, and most people consider it a solid :)
when you misread the title as "Scientist creare supersolid human"
Kind of a nice idea though...
I'm going to sleep now.
Great news. Now we can understand how the T1000 works!
I hope they'll build one soon; it could be a great war machine AND sex toy
Just wondering, what does pressure do then, nullify quantum mechanics laws ?
I like my outfit, it's inexpensive, but cool -- April Ryan
This is like asking for an industrial application for LSD.
A superfluid is a fluid that flows without viscosity, meaning that if you were to stir a spoon in a superfluid soup, you could take out the spoon and the soup would keep swirling forever on, since there is no mechanism there (i. e. no friction) to make the vortex you just made disappear. Now if you were to cool a 4He crystal, there would be eventually be no more movement of atoms and the whole thing froze out. But in quantum mechanics, there is the Heisenberg uncertainty Principle which basically states that you are not to now the position of any particle along with its velocity with the same accuracy. There will always be a trade off. The better you know the position, the worse you know the velocity. This accounts for the fact that even at absolute zero, there are some fluctuations of particles, called quantum fluctuations wich do never freeze out. When a superfluid appears this means that the atoms in it move all together. As the Nature article suggests, you can compare this to soldiers on a parade. They all move alike. In a supersolid then, you have vacancies, places where atoms are absent. Think of holes in a semiconductor if you like. There, holes are just non-electrons. Here we deal with non-atoms, and they are the ones behaving like soldiers in the case of a supersolid. Meaning the propagate through the whole thing as if they were on a parade, which makes them great for sending any wave (electromagnetic or other) through the crystal, and since these vacancies move in order, they propagate the wave without damping it. This would make a hell of an amplifier. Compare the situation to a superconductor, where you can propagate electric current without damping (i. e. having no resistance at all). To electric current, a superconductor behaves like a supersolid to waves of any kind.
Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
Depends on how you define "burn". There's weird stuff out there. For example, some people are confused by the idea that water can boil at near-freezing temperature... provided you remove enough atmospheric pressure so that it reaches its vapor pressure point quickly enough.
Well but sublimation != combustion and all that *cough*
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Are you the governer?
I'm delving deep into a nitpick, but this is /., so it's ok...
From a practical perspective liquid hydrogen and liquid peroxide *are* pretty dangerous. While it's true technically that 'liquid hydrogen' isn't going to react with gaseous oxygen readily, it sure doesn't take very much to turn liquid hydrogen into gaseous hydrogen (i.e not very much heat). In other words if you hold a burning match over an open container of liquid hydrogen it's probably going to start a serious explosion well before the match gets down to the liquid. Once the vapor above the liquid is combusting, you can guess what's going to happen to the remaining liquid...
The same goes for a spark, which is reason the parent said it wasn't good for an intercooler. Not that there's sparking going on all over the place, but you don't want to have the potential for an explosion if there happened to be a leak and an ignition source near each other.
wrong wrong wrong. not correct. go back to school. do not pass go, do not collect $200
That's a fallacy. The flow rate of ordinary plate glass is so slow that it would take billions of years before there would be a measurable change in thickness. Here are some articles on the subject.
Sapere aude!
In actuality, superfluids do NOT have zero viscosity at all points. They have very complex properties, depending on a combination of the container, exact conditions, etc, etc. Typically, some parts of superfluids exhibit zero viscosity (truly zero), leading to some fascinating fluid mechanics. For example, the Stokes singular problem actually has NO boundary layer, so drag goes to zero. There are plenty of other really interesting phenomenon - some that might be utilized in future technology.
Other interesting properties of superfluids include rather odd magnetic fields (Helium-3 or 4 is odd to start with, and then chilling it down and spinning it does some interesting stuff), VERY odd conduction, etc, etc. I imagine that there will be future Nobel prizes given out for research in this area (I believe one already has been, a few years back). Studying how superfluids act can give us some very interesting insights into what actually happens in various media at tiny sizes. One example would be looking at fluid/solid interfaces, and trying to determine what precisely goes on there. The possibilities are endless...
That being said, isn't the official definition of a fluid "something that deforms continuously under shear stress"? As such, does this indicate that these supersolids do NOT flow continuously?
"Don't bother me with that pocket calculator stuff" - Deep Thought
"Perhaps a condensed matter physicist can dumb the article down for layfolk such as myself?"
Imagine a big block of swiss cheese (the kind of cheese that's got all the holes in it). Now those holes are basically "vacancies" of cheese. Now, imagine if the holes moved around.
Similarly, think of one of those pictures underwater videos of SCUBA divers... You know when they release a breath, and all the bubbles start moving up to the surface of the water... Those are likes 'holes' in the water. More specifically, they are "vacancies" and they move in a somewhat orderly manner (up). Of course, it makes more common sense that vacancies would move around in a liquid than in solids....
So, basically, they've found a state of matter where the vacancies move around in a solid. In a sense, they're claiming that they found a block of cheese in the refridgerator where the holes keep moving. And this is why there's going to be controversy over this claim: they're alot of people who are going to say "no way - cheese doesn't work that way..."
It would make for a crazy club sandwich... Yum.
FYI: I'm not a condenced matter physicist, although I do happen to have a degree in the History and Philosophy of Science...
Any solid will flow. There are various mechanisms for this, but people usually refer to diffusion. Given sufficient time and temperature you can see any solid flow, and it doesn't have to melt into a liquid state for this to happen. The big thing here is that this supersolid is not liquid and that's because it retains a crystalline structure. Unlike a liquid, supersolid He has a structure that is ordered.
Did anyone else read "Scientists create supersoldier" at first?
Maybe I'm just a bit jumpy, because I've just had my morning coffee... BTW, do you people also hear a clicking sound every time you phone your left-wing journalist friend? Strange...
I helped move some furniture from the 1880s that included some thick mirrors. There was noticeable distortion at the bottom of the mirrors that wasn't perceptable, if present, at the top. The bottom of the mirrors looked wavy.
I can say for sure, but it looked like the glass had flowed in only 100 years or so. Maybe glass technology has changed. Maybe I misunderstood what was happening.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
You obviously did not read any of the 3 articles I linked to.
Plate glass used to be made by dipping a tube into molten glass (1000 degrees Fahrenheit or so), gathering up a blob, blowing that blob into a bubble, poking a hole in the bubble, and spinning the tube so that the bubble's hole opens up. Done correctly it makes a flat circle of glass with the end of the tube in the center. This glass is relatively even in thickness but it is still thicker in the middle then at the sides.
They let the glass cool and then cut it into squares with one side closer to the middle. This side is thicker than the rest of the piece and was usually placed toward the bottom of the window because it was reasoned that the heaviest part and strongest part should be at the base. It was not until the Float Glass process was invented in 1959 that truly flat glass was available. Up until then there would almost always be some parts of plate glass that were thicker or wavy, giving rise to the flowing glass myth.
Sapere aude!
Technically, room temperature glass is always flowing, just reeeeeeeally slowly, but we still call it "solid glass"
-P
There is a cool thermal acoustic refrigeration technique that employs hemholtz principals described in American Scientist a few moons ago. There is also a means of using a Hemholtz filter to create a kind of check valve (I have to look for that reference... if you need it ask) hence providing a "one-way" flow.
The most impressive story i will read today, and whats the picture in the article of? some bloody marching! why cant we see it?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Water is already an oxide. In fact it is an oxide of hydrogen. So I doubt water being more flammable than even liquid hydrogen.
What's the big friggin deal? I've been using this stuff in the flux capacitor of my DeLorean for like twenty years...
~Doc
Is glass liquid or solid? says:
...glass is a supercooled liquid... is also a popualar belief...
There is no clear answer to the question "Is glass solid or liquid?"...
more of this also here another page
I personal think of it as a supercooled liquid. Just think about how glass is blown into its shape.
_JS
I quote for the article: " Although it is a crystalline solid, it can 'flow' like the most slippery liquid imaginable - in fact, like a liquid with no viscosity." Then how can you tell it is really solid. Also from what I remember from my highschool physiscs helium does not have a solid agregation state and if it was so trivial to obtain it by just compressing it to 60 atm I wonder why nobody figure it out until 2004. ;)
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Helmholtz was born on 8/31/1821 in Potsdam, Germany. He ended his breathing on 9/8/1894 in Berlin, Germany.
Hence, he could not have been a Nazi...
PS, some info Helmholtz .
All these complicated terms sound like ICE-9 to me anyway...
Glass does flow to some extent. I've done the experiment where you hang a weight off a glass thread and watch it flow. Whether or not this has anything to do to with windows is another matter.
it would take billions of years before there would be a measurable change in thickness.
So what you're saying is that they actually do flow. In reality they flow faster than "billions of years", but either way, it's a liquid.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Is that a supercrystallinesolidliquid?
~S
...expect to see the next generation of Apple PowerBooks constructed from Helium-4, "the world's strongest metal".
http://www.glandscape.com/ascii.html HTH.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I think you are referring to this little project (contains some nice photos), the substance was however nitrogen, not helium.
My quality social news site.com.
One of the big problems our power grid has is that electricity must be generated based on demand. There's no way to store electricity for use later during peak hours.
However, a fluid or solid that "once stirred would continue swirling forever" sounds like an interesting possibility for a storage device. Imagine causing the fluid to begin spinning at a high rate using electromagnetic fields. Then, at some later time (i.e., peak demand periods), converting the kinetic energy of the fluid back into electricity. In a sense, it's a frictionless gyro that acts as a kinetic battery.
"Who would've thought inflammable meant flammable?"
-Dr. Nick
Dr. Nick: Inflammable means flammable? What a country!
If something can flow then its liquid NOT a solid. I'm not arguing the physics, I'm arguing the definition of the english words.
The not entirely unrelated science of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging found its way into medical imaging devices, leading to early detection and cure of many cancers.
Its possible that this technology could end up in some very sensitive detectors (see previous threads for the possiblility of perfect amplifiers) that allow Doctors to view biochemical processes as they happen in a living organism. This would lead to a complete revolution in medicine, understanding protein folding, alzheimers, MS, etc would happen almost overnight.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
I followed your link and look what I found on that site, curious... As glass in neither liquid nor solid, because its molecules are motionless (like a solid) but random in configuration (like a liquid), glass exists in a solid yet transparent state. So what is it :)
Anyone got an inspiring phase diagram?
My layman's observation of things physical is that our models and ideas of the world tend to break down at extremes, e.g. Newtonian physics doesn't work with high speeds (close to c ) or enormous masses. This helium is cooled to an extreme, so I wouldn't be surprised if our idea of solid-liquid doesn't apply and a new model must be formulated. I could be wrong.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
And along those lines.... if we peer closer and closer, say observing a single atom, there's no possible way to define it as a solid or a liquid without reference to interactions.
A supercooled liquid.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
A better example than cheese may be the classic nine puzzle. It is solid but has clearly movable holes.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Or, of course, non-inflammable, which means it doesn't go up in flames. and means the same as non-flammable, except it's a proper English word.
I could never watch Duel without getting annoyed by the large "FLAMMABLE" on the back of the truck.
Ydco co
Although supersolid He4 does not seem like a solid, by some definitions it is. At any given instant, the atoms in the material appear to be in a crystalline lattice (not bouncing around like the atoms in a liquid). But if you exert any force on that supersolid, the vacancies and defects in the lattice instantly shift to let the solid move. This gives the "solid" a shear strength of zero even if the atoms seem like they are arranged in what appears to be a rigid crystal structure.
The problem with commonsense notions of "solid" vs. "liquid" is that they don't reflect all the possible states of matter, only the ones that occur at room temperatures. Science usually finds these counterintuitive phenomena outside the usual conditions of everyday life (like when physicists proved that Newton's centuries old laws only work for "slow" speeds, so we need Eistein's equations to understand higher speeds).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
laid off that is...
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
When I worked in the field, it was common to have nested dewars containing nitrogen, hydrogen and helium. LH2 liquifies at a temperature intermediate between N2 and He, and this arrangement reduced thermal losses.
IANAP, but we already have almost frictionless gyroscopes that don't extreme temperatures. I don't see any advantage the fluid offers over these--only added difficulties.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Anyone who has worked with stained glass knows that glass definitely does flow. You normally score a line with the cutter, then break it. If you take a coffee break, or go home for the day and come back and try to break it, most likeley it will not break, because the scored line has flowed back together. It comes down to a matter of degree. I remember that some colors were more sensitive than others, and I don't doubt that modern plate glass flows at an incredibly slow rate, but it probably still flows.
sometimes i likes to sits and thinks, and sometimes i just likes to sits
sometimes i likes to sits and thinks, and sometimes i just likes to sits
It doesn't say very much yet!
Wikileaks, no DNS
I have no idea how any mods could mod this +3 Interesting. It takes only an elementary chemistry student to tell you that H2O has a higher oxidation state than H2, so it's less likely to be oxidized further. If someone could burn H2O with oxygen and create something even more stable I figure he'd get a Nobel Prize.
jello anyone?
Suppose you have a metal. This has positive nucleii, bound electrons which screen most of the nuclear charge, and conduction band electrons which can move thorughout the lattice, but also help to screen the nuclear charge. The whole thing is electrically neutral.
Suppose then you have some cloud of negative charge. This charge will repel the local electrons, and will attract the local nucleii. The nuclear lattice will bend a bit towards the center of the charge cloud, generating a local region of increased positive charge density that is screened out by the cloud of charge, and the other electrons.
Now, suppose this charge cloud moves. You have the same attractions and repulsions, but the nucleii have more mass per unit charge than the electrons in the cloud, so they will take a bit of time to react. The induced positive charge region will then lag behind the negative cloud, and will tend to drag it back. If you had a second negative cloud following some way behind the first one, it might be attracted towards this positive region.
If you had two conduction band electrons with long deBroglie wavelengths, with the same sorts of velocities and at the right distance apart, then you can get this sort of action. Over a limited range, you can get electrons to apparently attract each other, via electron-phonon iteraction.
This pairing up of electrons is pretty weak. If this was the only thing holding them together then you would not get superconductivity in ordinary materials above a few millikelvin. However, one they start organizing like that, then they can all tend towards a lowest energy state, where they are all moving like a single enormous particle, with a wavelength that is so much larger than most of the usual things that scatter electrons. A more electrons join this single state, an energy gap opens up betweeen the electrons that are in the state, and the ones that aren't, and it becomes more energetically tempting for other electrons to go with the flow. This energy gap stabilizes the superelectron state, and lets superconductivity happen at kelvin rather than millikelvin.
We have lots of particles giving off heat, but it isn't solidification. We don't have electrons standing shoulder to shoulder like soldiers. One superelectron's wave will significantly overlap hundreds or thousands of other superelectrons. If they had rigid orientations, then a supercurrent could not flow down a wire that got thinner, any more than your cheese with holes in it could flow down a funnel. Also, the electron-phonon coupling only binds if the electrons move. So, forget marching soldiers, unless you have soldiers that can see what is happening a hundred ranks ahead, and automatically calculate a path that will give zero jostling with their neighbours. It is not really a state that exist in the macroscopic world, but you can sort of guess what it might be like: everyone been cool and mellow and getting along with their neighbour, until one guy borrows the lawnmower without asking, or drinks the last beer in the fridge, and then it all suddenly collapses.
Okay, now if I get the article, you can get the same sort of thing with holes in a superfluid. The helium atoms can form a similar cooperating superfluid. The forces that balance to keep the atoms flowing in a coordianted fashion are different, but the principle is the same. If the particules are moving, and enough of their fields overlap, then there will be a lowest energy state, and one enough of them have discovered it, and particles can find it faster than random thermal fluctions can chuck them out, then everhting moves smoothly.
Helium atoms as lots of little round fuzzy things. Normally they overlap with lots of their neighbours. As you squish two of them together, the repulsive nuclear forces starts to rise sharply. The strong repulsive forces from the nearest neighbours will be bigger than the others, and wil
When scientist first discovered that you could split some atoms under certain conditions, they didn't know what it could be used for... but today we know we can use it for a lot of things (including, sadly enought, weapons that can kill a city in a single instant).
Sometimes science has no other intended purpose than to push back the borders of ignorance, but the eventiall fallout from it is enourmous. Who would have thought that a few entusiasts playing with liquidfueled rockets in the 20's would - eventually and via a lot of backroads - lead to the invention of velcro?
Ask again in a few decades, I'm sure people will be surpriced by all the things we didn't realise you can use supersolids for.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Heisenberg was never sure whether he did it or not.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
But I've seen cathedral windows that weren't just a different thickness at the bottom, they were sagging open at the top! The top part of the window actually bowed down. Sure looked like it flowed to me...otherwise, they installed all the windows with unevenly distributed arched holes at the top.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If I had a link to the video I'd give it to you, but it was on Discovery channel. If you still won't believe me I could tape it for you in case it airs again.
The first Professor of Physics at the University of Queensland, Professor Thomas Parnell, began an experiment in 1927 to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit quite surprising properties. The experiment demonstrates the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar once used for waterproofing boats. At room temperature pitch feels solid - even brittle - and can easily be shattered with a blow from a hammer. It's quite amazing then, to see that pitch at room temperature is actually fluid!
In 1927 Professor Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into glass funnel with a sealed stem. Three years were allowed for the pitch to settle, and in 1930 the sealed stem was cut. From that date on the pitch has slowly dripped out of the funnel - so slowly that now, 72 years later [1998], the eighth drop is only just about to fall.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Yeah, learned that one the hard way!
Everyone knows that velcro was invented by the Vulcans. Geez, somebody was asleep in history class.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Strange, all my glass objects have shapes. Try laying off the weed, AC.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
This was invented now? :-)
I thought they used it in Terminator movies.
For those who find "vacancies" troubling, think of the Terminator character who flows.
redirect? Bah!
You should use well-defined web standards such as CSS!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Something can swim in water and not be a fish because the definition of a fish is NOT just
something that lives in water. However a solid DOES NOT FLOW. Ok? If it even flows a tiny amount like pitch then its STILL a liquid.
Maybe that nice reporter lady who told us all about the weight of clouds in terms of elephants could have a go at dumbing it down for us?
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
I know it's a different topic, but this reminds me of something I saw a few years back on Discovery channel or the Learning channel. They made what was, or at least looked like, solid smoke. It looked as if someone froze time, whent in a heavily cigarette smoke filled room, and simply cut a cube of it out Completely transparent other that looking like a cube of wispy smoke.
Although I can't recall what they called it or exactly what it was composed of, they went through the process of making it. They also has a sheet of the stuff and a guy stood on one side of it while they used a blowtorch on the other side of it aimed at him. Dissapated the heat instantly, and almost no wieght to it either.
Anyway, my question is, does anyone else here know what I am referring to? I'd like to look into it more.
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
But I've seen cathedral windows that weren't just a different thickness at the bottom, they were sagging open at the top!
On the other hand, as one of the links points out, you can disprove the theory by simple mathematics.
Cathedral window age = 500 years
Cathedral window sag = 1 cm
Theoretical sag rate = 500 years/cm
Egyptian/Greek/Whatever glass vessel age = 3000 years
Theoretical sag rate = 500 years/cm
Expected sag of 300 year old glass = 6 cm
As the link notes, if glass flowed over time, all the old glassware in museums would show definite signs of puddling -- even taking into account differences in formulae. At the very least, the broken edges would have smoothed themselves like ripped-apart Silly Putty.
I wasn't convinced until I read the link. I had completely bought into the sagging glass idea!
Here's an alternate theory for the cathedral glass. When the window was made, using old-school techniques, they ended up with some imperfect pieces. Do you put those at the bottom, where the bishop will see them... or put them at the top, and let God decide if He cares?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Remove head from sphincter, then post. Did you completely miss the sarcasm or what?
Funny enough inflammable means flammable. Haven't you seen the Simpsons?
Trilogy Of Errors episode, Dr Nick's office burns down due to ether catching on fire and Dr Nick Says: "Flammable means inflammable?! What a country!"
This is Helium 4 we're talking about. It is obviously better than Helium 3. Your dad needs to get with the times.
oops, i should read the rest of the nested comments before replying =)
forget that! I want a chinese spouting bowl..
http://www.kleinbottle.com/Spouting Bowls.htm
Fear not gentle troon, you can watch Duel without trepidation for flammable is a perfectly cromulent word.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Pyroclastic flows are like an avalanche and require a fluid to lubricate the solid. This is typically air or a gas. A pyroclastic flow, if anything most resembles an avalanche, albeit, a very hot one.
It really amazes me that people think of stuff like this...
They did this by filling the narrow channels of a porous form of glass (called Vycor) with helium, and freezing it by cooling it down and squeezing it to more than 60 times atmospheric pressure. A disk of the helium-filled glass was then set spinning. At about 0.175 C above absolute zero, the disk suddenly started to rotate more easily - precisely what would be expected if the helium became a supersolid.
Holy crap! Who comes up with stuff like this?!?! It reminds me of the great mystery of Maple Syrup, another "who the hell comes up with this stuff" example.
"Well Bob, if I suck the sap out of this here tree, but only at a certain time of year, and then save it up until I have a lot of it, I'm gonna boil it all for a couple of days until it turns into syrup."
Obviously, ancient peoples had a lot of time on their hands, to be able to devise maple syrup. Seems like a lot of random crap. Also seems like us modern peoples have a bit too much time on our hands too, with the supersolid helium and all.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
The apparent healing of the crack that you witness is not due to flow of the material, but rather chemical attack. When you score the glass you get 2 free surfaces with unsatified bonds. These bonds are rapidly satisfied by atmospheric molecules; mostly, water or hydroxyls. These molecules have a corrosive effect of the glass surface. Over time, the once atomically sharp crack-tip is blunted by this corrosion mechanism and the glass is effectively strengthened.
The AC is totally right, glass is not a liquid it is an amorphous solid. Glass is not a supercooled liquid, it is just a solid that has some give in it due to the lack of much of a crystalline structure. Look at it this way, sand is a solid and yet it flows because each particle is weakly linked to the particles around it.
Sapere aude!
When Faraday demonstrated his quaint finding of electricity to the Prince of Wales (even then, princes of Wales were not sure what to do with their lives), this royal twit wanted to know what it was good for. Faraday's answer was (I paraphrase) something like: "Well, your Highness, perhaps you can tax it someday". "Nuff said I think.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Glass is is an amorphous solid, a solid that has some give in it due to the lack of much of a crystalline structure. Look at it this way, sand is a solid and yet it flows because each particle is weakly linked to the particles around it. Glass is similar to this but on a molecular scale.
Imagine a solid as being a bunch of blocks that represent the molecules in that solid. If you cool that solid down slowly with a gentle vibration (due to thermal effects) the blocks have time for the natural attractions between themselves to manifest and stick themselves together in layers forming a very tight and ordered solid. On the other hand cool a substance down quickly and each brick just locks in place without packing neatly to the bricks near it. The resulting solid has a jumble of molecules that stuck every which way and whose attractive surfaces are not well aligned. Thus this disordered solid has less attraction between each molecule and it can settle and "flow", but it is not a liquid.
Try this experiment. Take a bucket of those small rectangular building bricks that kids use (not Legos). Put a bunch in a bucket and gently vibrate the bucket for a while. The parts will settle and will form a packed structure that won't move much. In fact if the bucket is full and you gently overturn the bucket you might be able to get a tower of pieces that will hardly move. Next try just randomly toss those pieces into the bucket and give it one rough shake. The pieces will settle some but will still have a lot of slip between them, if you overturn this bucketful the pieces will probably end in a pile which will slump down as loose pieces slide off of it.
Sapere aude!
Just because something flows slowly does not mean that it is a liquid. As I have stated elsewhere glass flows because it is an amorphous solid and the individual molecules of glass are weakly linked enough that they can rearrange to some extent. If there is a force acting upon these molecules then they will tend to be influenced by that force. This even happens in crystalline structures but to a much smaller extent.
To put it another way, a pile of sand is a solid and yet it can flow. A steel wire is a solid and yet if you put a weight on it it will begin to stretch and deform.
Sapere aude!
So does the mass itself flow or is it the wave propagation within the mass that flows?
If the former, than what happens to this mass under constant acceleration? I would surmise that without friction, there would be no heat buildup thus we could get this thing "flowing" pretty darn fast. If the latter, well, we can accelerate a wave through this matter maybe even faster than the speed of light. But then again, there was already an article on that kind of stuff.
Who would use liquid hydrogen as a coolant? Well, people who design space planes have proposed running liquid hydrogen through leading-edge surfaces to warm up the liquid hydrogen, cool the wing, and then burn the gaseous hydrogen in the rocket engine.
An aside, but hopefully an interesting one.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
the main difference is that solids have a cristaline formation, while fluids do not...
thats why people say glass is not a solid, because it doesnt have a cristaline formation..
perhaps this concept is too simple to be right, but I think it can explain why this is a supersolid, and not a superfluid... it still has cristaline formation...
cristaline formation is when all the atoms are aligned, like a perfect 3d matrix (sometimes not so perfect.. ) where each vertex is an atom
but don't listen to me... I dropped out of phisics university after 1 year...
No doubt about it, I'm a moron. Should have been thorough.
The effect on those mirrors was striking. It seems hard to believe that they couldn't build a flatter plate of glass. I'll find out more about this.
Another bit just came to mind. I seem to remember theat some astronomer types are still going back to the old telescopes with lenses that aren't all that large. An article said something about them being able to get information otherwise not available because the same stars had been observed with the same optics for so long. Dang, should have remembered this.
Sorry for taking up space guys. I'll do better.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
YOU GO GLASS MASTER!
Theonlyuse of monkeys is to testthings onthem.Some peoplemay say"Hey That'scruel!"and myresponse is"I don't like monkeys
Even in those cases, there are no liquid substances involved, but the behaviour is still liquid. Hence, the argument against the great-grandparent post still stands.
On the first day of therodynamics, he looked around and noticed that there were no women enrolled in the class. He announced: "I see there are only men here. Good. That means I can swear a lot."
He once assigned a difficult problem set over a holiday weekend. The physics wasn't that hard, but one of the problems required some terrible algebraic manipulation. At the start of the lecture when the assignment was due, some students approached him to ask for more time. Before they could explain the problem, he granted the extension, complaining "I spend my whole fucking weekend on this goddamn fucking algebra!" (He wasn't kidding when he said he'd swear a lot...)
A couple of semesters later, we saw him in the elevator and asked how things were going. He said that a student filed a "fucking complaint" because of his language. He asked us, "Do you think I fucking swear a lot in class?"
Another day, a friend of mine, "A", was wearing a sweatshirt with a football player on it. Moses talked to him after class:
M: You play football?
A: I was a linebacker in high school.
M: You suffer... brain damage?
A: You grade my problem sets... what do you think?
Another time, we were in the basement of the physics building, in a lab for another class. Moses found us, and enlisted our help: The safety inspectors were in the building, and we needed to remove his ping-pong table from the stairwell before they found it.
Finally, a few choice quotes from his lectures:
"You are not truly relaxed until you are dead."
"He was a consummated theorist."
"We call the partition function 'Z' because Boltzmann spoke German."
In reality, they do not flow faster than billions of years. It's relatively easy to find someone who's done the math on teh intarweb; I suggest you look for it.
However, the parent post wasn't challenging that, or even that glass was a liquid. The parent post was challenging that in 200-2000 years (average holy building age) the flow of glass would cause a variance in thickness between the top and bottom, and in that he was correct.
It's very hard to misunderstand this, since the remainder of his post was about why the variance in thickness was there. I think you're just trying to feel right.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Glaciers flow, and they're considered solid, being made of ice (ice being the solid state of water for those non-physics-trained readers out there).
Helium...almost never has a charge
On earth, that is. In stars, helium is always ionized, as is everything else!
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
No liquid but a fluid, i.e. a gas, either air or the SO2/superheated steam mix that comes out of a volcano. This is not the same as piling a powder up until it becomes unstable.
Cool, always worth knowing EXACTLY what you are saying!
I'll have to keep this in mind in the future. But by the examples you have given isn't this still a fallacy? Someone is taking evidence (glass is thicker on the bottom) and the knowledge that glass is similar to a liquid in the fact that it is disordered and coming to the conclusion that glass is a slow-flowing liquid. That sounds like a flaw in reasoning rather than a lie.
Sapere aude!
If you introduce a swirl wouldn't the end result be a layer flowing around the outer edge of the container with an empty center?
Unless you've a constant force (like the container boundary) to hold the atoms in a circular path it seems to me that they will migrate as far in the initial direction they can until the wall of the container forces them to modify their direction.
Mmmmmm Thorazine....
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
A 'Barelysolid'. Supersolid sounds like it is only vulnerable to Kryptonite or something.
Eat at Joe's.
sounds like possible elasticity to me...
sure normal elasticity theory doesn't involve quantum mechanics (it's a continuum theory), but maybe those two theories collide here.
I'm imagining this material, the supersolid, but with no external force applied, yet it bends on its own, and possibly recoils, driven by quantum fluctuations.
Surely at some point some argument in favor of keeping the object "crystalline" would keep the fluid together, and give the appearance of being elastic.
maybe someone here would comment on this...
is this supersolid theory bordering on quantum elasticity?
So much for university.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
"Jack in the Crack" (Jack in the Box) has had supersolid like milkshakes for years.....hard as hell to use a straw.
O...btw, this is meant to be a funny.
How could it improve current technology?
Are there any bad things that could happen as a result of its use?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
of course it sagged, solids bend, everything bends.
Nothing is not flexible. If you walk on a bridge that can hold hundreds of semi-trucks, and you are the only thing on it you have bent the brigde. Just a very small amount. Even the bridge sitting there will bend some over time. Look at beams and pretty much any solid, they bend. They have to. If nothing bent everything would shatter. Dimonds don't bend very well, they just shatter.
Aww, I was hoping "one-dimensional" really meant "one-dimensional". Damn.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
How can they tell that it is solid? (not a super fluid liquid?) My high school definition of solid is that it maintains its shape. Has that been observed? Did they use Raman scattering or something to probe its structure?
That depends. What state are you in? California? Wisconsin?
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Hey folks...
This is not mysterious. Whenever you take things to extreme conditions... one should expect to see behavior inconsistent with day to day life as we know it.
You put a diamond in an ultra high pressure anvil and jack the pressure up to greater than that found at the center of the earth and you discover, that the diamond is still solid, but it begins to flow... that's the nature of insanely high force on matter.
You create weird states of matter (like a Bose-Eistein condensate), and you can pretty much expect weird behavior. Very counterintutive. Liquids that flow uphill, have weird viscocity, are superconductors (which means electrically and thermally.)
That said, we keep pushing the limits of matter, energy, space, and time... expect to hear weirder and weirder stuff as we proceed... Rod Serling has nothing on what's coming up next!
amorphous P Pronunciation Key (-morfs) adj. 1.Lacking definite form; shapeless. 2.Of no particular type; anomalous. 3.Lacking organization; formless. 4.Lacking distinct crystalline structure.
I guess definition 4. is invoked here.
however, I invoke definition 1. in the previous post.
It's all about definitions. I concede.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
I've lived in the North East of the United States, so I have a clue here to share with you.
...and what happenes when it's forgotten? It boils down a bit and becomes thicker. A curious person, with lots of time on their hands due to the snow on the ground, and wa-la. Maple Syrup.
During winter, ice and wind can break tree branches. This should be obvious, and some of the trees are of a type called "Sugar Maple".
When spring comes, the sap flows up into the trees to supply the growing leaf buds.
Sap, reaching the broken branches, leaks out. Sometimes, actually most years, it's still cold enough to make litteral "sap icecles" hanging from the broken tree branches.
Guess what? That frozen sap tastes great! Bring some in, put it in a pot on the wood stove to warm up.
You might as well ask yourself who invented lye-soap. Boil-down water that has leached through wood ash, take the resulting residue and mix it with lard, and wa-la! Soap!
By saying it "[s]eems like a lot of random crap", you under estimate the curiousity of billions of human beings who have lived before you. Minds as fantastic as Einstein, Liebnitz, Von Savant, have happened before, sometimes in the bodies of poor farmers with nothing to do but look at what was going on around them in tree sap, wood ash, and left-over animal fat.
No one told Firestone to mix sulphur with the rubber and fry it, he just tried it one day for the heck of it. And I thank Cromm for such curiosity, for we would all be pounding rocks without it.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
No. I suppose I could have been clearer on the point. Fallacy isn't error in deduction, which is always suspect. Fallacy is applying rules which are known to be in error. What you're suggesting is an interesting and subtle misinterpretation of what I said, and something I'm going to need to be a lot more careful about specifying in the future.
/also/ peppered with fallacy, but on the whole, that list represents a revealing of and refinement of knowledge, not (in any real sense) the undoing of bad logic. We weren't cavement because we believed quantuum mechanics due to the teachings of our parents/elders (argumentum ad verecundiam,) out of appeal to furce (ad baculum,) or because all the other cavemen believed in QM (ad populum;) it was simply because we didn't know not only about QM, but about physics, or in most cases fire.
Induction and deduction are implicitly guesses, and therefore suspect. More specifically, they're best guesses; you go with the available evidence, and if something new crops up that replaces it, well, great, let's all jump ship. Common sense was replaced by classical physics was replaced by newtonian physics was replaced by relativistic physics was replaced by quantuum mechanics; we'll probably be adding something to that list in the next 30 years or so (strings and branes are the horse i'm putting my money on.) Herbalism to Alchemy to Phlogiston to Oxidation to Modern Chemistry to Materials Science. The list for math is obscene. Computer science is already doing pretty well for lists itself, but that's my field, so that may just reflect my better understanding of its history than the other topics.
None of that is fallacy. It's falsehood. Granted, history of science is
The issue here is that they've been given a good explanation, and facts which support it. At that point, no amount of re-explanation is a fallacy; if it were the case that the glass had been flat and then that the glass after N years was thicker at the bottom, then the explanation they were giving would in fact be both logical and sound. The issue is that their supporting facts are false - the glass was never univorm, and therefore there is a question of whether significant flow has in fact occurred, which it has not.
Arguments topple due to both fallacies and falsehoods. The germane difference is whether it's the initial facts or the logic which led to a result which is in error. This would be fallacy if this guy had said "it's true because Bill Nye said so," or "It's obviously true because everybody knows it," or "It's been known since such-and-such ancient book, so clearly it's true" (This kills me - one of my favorite comics, Lewis Black, indulged in argumentum ad lazarum when mocking the Atkins Diet, questioning whether we'd in fact been eating exactly the wrong thing since the dawn of civilization. Though it left me in tears laughing, which is probably the important part, that is in fact fallacy.)
I should point out that making a misstep during reasoning is not the same thing as a fallacy. A fallacy is using one of a concrete series of logical errors; an error in reasoning is an error in reasoning. If you neglect to take an issue into account, or go through a complex series of reasoning and accidentally swap two individuals leading to error, or if you make a judgement based on a misimpression regarding an individual or situation, that's not a fallacy; that's an error, which leads to a falsehood. Fallacies are using mechanisms which are in error in justification. Whereas this list isn't complete, there's a good primer at each of these links.
Therefore:
- I killed the queen because she was an alien, so she'll ruin us all.
Action on false
StoneCypher is Full of BS