Scientists Create New Form of Matter

soren100 writes "Yahoo News has a story about scientists creating a sixth form of matter. They are calling their new state of matter a 'fermionic condensate.' Somehow they got potassium atoms to form pairs similar to the 'Cooper pairs' that make superconducting possible. Maybe any quantum physicists around can tell us more about this, but it certainly sounds pretty revolutionary. The scientists are predicting that this will lead to 'room temperature solid' superconductors, which in turn will enable us to have better electricity generators, more efficient electric motors, and (our favorite) cheaper maglev trains."

Comments

Look at Europe, Asia

[nniillss]

You can order a maglev from Siemens, Germany, at any time. Provided you have a deep pocket.

This is news?! :-)

[ylodi]

Croatian scientist Danijel Djurek discovered superconducting ceramic that works reliably at room temperature. Danijel says that current will flow without resistance through the material, which is a mixture of lead, lead carbonate, and silver oxides. Here is article in today's croatian daily paper (sorry, there is no translation). Old news on you.com.au.

Re:Sixth form of matter?

[jochietoch]

Frankly, I wish they would stop claiming every phase transition to form 'the n-th state of matter'. There are literally hundreds of phase transitions in nature, especially at low temperatures. If you start calling every sector of the phase diagram 'a New State Of Matter (tm)' on an equal footing with gases, liquids and solids, you can't stop at Bose-Einstein condensates and these fermionic condensates. What about superconducting metals, vortex lattices, liquid crystals, flowing sand, and what have you. All New Forms Of Matter. That is to say, it's completely arbitrary. Sure it's cool what these guys have done, but they deliberately misrepresent their result to make a catchy headline. A scientist has a responsibility not to do that.

Re:Practical application

[danila]

First of all, let me just say that in some way they are correct, since we can expect their work to eventually have some practical applications. But this is not terribly relevant today. What is relevant is that scientists are forced by our society to lie about these uses to get public support and public funding. Read any press releas? and it will claim the invention/discovery will help fight terrorism, fight SARS, bring fusion to reality, save people from falling skyscrapers, save soldiers' lives in the battlefield, or at least create faster computers and more effective batteries.

Here is a relevant quote from the adorable Feynman:

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, hut something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, hut then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing--and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

I used to have a room temperature superconductor

[panurge]

I actually had part of a sample on my desk at one point in the early 90s. It was about 3/4 of a turn from an experimental helix, and the reason that it was 3/4 of a turn was that when the current had been put through the helix it had abruptly stopped superconducting and broken up. As I understand it, this is the big problem with superconductors: the runaway thermal destruction the moment the combination of temperature and field strength exceeds the superconducting envelope.

It's interesting how all the big ideas of the 1940s and 1950s have come to nothing: no people walking around on the Moon or Mars, no widespread personal jet aircraft, no fusion reactors, nuclear power limited by safety concerns and the availability of cooling water, limited use of superconducting magnets, lasers being used in CD players rather than as enormous weapons. Fifty years later, most research seems to be into making things smaller and smaller, or making tiny quantities of exotic things (as in this case.) Surely the remaining proponents of the Big Ideas should have learned to stay quiet by now?

It shouldn't be necessary

[Per Abrahamsen]

Research as fundamental as this should be funded, with no regard to practical applications. These scientists shoudn't be forced to think about practical applications, that is the job of other scientists, later in the process.

Re:Privatize Education

[TGK]

Are you out of your mind? The only one of those that has the slightest prayer of working is private school.... and even that will only provide an education to those who can afford it.

Argue all you like, there is a fundamental truism in Education. Those who can do, those who can't teach. The reason is simple, teaching doesn't pay shit. The related catch 22, which is that if you pay teachers more you'll attract some decent teachers but a lot of people who are just looking for job security and a nice salary, is also pretty much inescapable. Again, argue all you want, at this stage it's about what you believe about human nature.

So moving on, if the basic problem is that teachers (as a whole, there are of course individual exceptions) are some of the least qualified people in their fields. We are confronted with the problem of how to get good teachers into the classroom while introducing a minimum number of disinterested individuals. Let's examine how the three methods you advocate do that.

Private Schools -- Have the option of paying more, but frequently don't. They do have the advantage of being more or less immune to the completely insane federal regulations (such as No Child Left Behind) and therefore able to operate within the bounds of reality, but will ultimately fail the American People because we need to educate more than just the children of the wealthy. Higher scores? Of course, most standardized test scores can be expressed as a function of socio-economic status

Home schools -- Again, a problem of who can get into it. Most American families require two incomes to survive, and that's not addressing those with only one parent. How can you home school these kids?

Community Schools -- Here you encounter many of the same problems as public schools (in terms of teacher pay and regulations). This isn't solving the problem, it's shifting it off onto a community with fewer resources less able to deal with the it.

So what can we do? Well a big part of the problem is funding. Michigan has boosted test scores through the roof by socializing their education across the state. No longer is the funding of a school tied to the taxes generated locally, rather all those taxes are thrown together and applied to all schools across the state. The result is the application of funds where they are needed the most.

Another part remains the ability to attract good teachers to bad areas. Wealthy school districts with well behaved kids and lots of resources will never have problems attracting teachers. Ask at your local college's education school... most of the applications go to the ritzy 'burbs. So how do you get teachers into the inner city? The rural backwoods areas? You pay them for it of course, and you pay them in the best way possible.... student loans. Granting temporary licensure to BA and BS holders to teach for three years is fairly easy to do in most states (No Child Left Behind will make it all but impossible). Let these young graduates teach the next generation, let them emerge from those disadvantaged schools debt free and able to enter the professional world with solid experiance and confidance. The forgiveness of tens of thousands in debt will draw graduates to these jobs like nothing else and will allow these underfunded schools some of the nations brightest minds, if only for a few years.

What we're doing now doesn't work. You're right, we need real change, but not the kind of change that only benefits the few. Public education must benefit all. Should we fail even a few, we have failed the community as a whole. Education is the silver bullet. Crime? Hunger? Even longevity is beneficially affected by education. We don't need "No Child Left Behind" or school vouchers, we need to actually leave no children behind, and we need to do it be strengthening the public schools.