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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."
Maybe, but how will you tell the real quantum physicists from the myriad of armchair quantum physicists who think they know what it's all about.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Smacks like "gotta tell them at least about some possible application to keep us funded"-talk.
Being able to do that cool thing where you take a metal toy and then put a magnet under the desk and make it move around, you know that thing, now you can do it through walls.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
"They cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree C above absolute zero or minus 459 degrees F -- which is the point at which matter stops moving.
They confined the gas in a vacuum chamber and used magnetic fields and laser light to manipulate the potassium atoms into pairing up.
"This is very similar to what happens to electrons in a superconductor," Jin said.
This is more likely to provide applications in the practical world than a Bose-Einstein condensate, she said, because fermions are what make up solid matter."
Hmmmmm; how are they going to come to a process that can produce an extruded filament that can be bought in Radio Shack, if cooling to such a low temperature is needed in the process?
Time to dump all your oil shares boys!
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
more efficient electric motors, and (our favorite) cheaper maglev trains.
Maglevs are cool, but the real slashdotter wants to know how it will help build space elevators.
"The new matter form is called a fermionic condensate and it is the sixth known form of matter -- after gases, solids, liquids, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995." Come on people, RTFA already... :)
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
The article seems to highly stress the practical application of this new form of matter. Doesn't this seem too optimistic or unrealistic? If it's a new form of matter, surely there must be properties which even researchers are unsure about. What are the safety and health issues involved in using this in 'practical applications'?
Bose-Einstein condensate
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Clinton took it.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
the 21st century's version of the 20th's "i was promised rocket cars!" will be "i was promised maglevs!"
maglevs always seem to be just around the corner... perpetually...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Last I heard they are/were working on one... I forget which city but I know it was either Pittsburgh, or Baltimore. They haven't even started construction....
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
You militant assholes should refuse medical help when the cops beat you up next time.
Although in this case I suspect they count BEC as the fifth as they are particle physcists and it is the chemists and chemical physicists who get exicted by Liquid Crystals.
Lets see... ... ...
They cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree C above absolute zero or minus 459 degrees F -- which is the point at which matter stops moving.
Step 1. Freeze until cold cold cold (like a regular superconductor)
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Have a room temperature superconductor
Step 4. PROFIT!!!!
Ok, seriously... Whats to say that you can't get any kind of matter to act like superconductors at a low enough temperature?
And while I'm at it:
Imagine a beowulf clust.....
Presentation of this story suggests that this work is a step towards room temp superconductors. While this may be true, I suspect it is no more true of this that any other significant development of our understanding of that wierd stuff we call 'quantum'.
I really dont see superconductors becoming feasable at room temperatures anytime soon (i.e. 100 years) unless we all decide we actually like it when our rooms are well below freezing.
New forms of matter are interesting - but that they are found only at a billionth of a degree above absolute zero is no more interesting to me than the fact that we can build a fridge able to get stuff down to those temperatures in the first place. I'd be scared if we didn't find some spooky stuff going on!
I believe there's a monorail in Springfield, Illinois. It's well documented; I thought everyone knew about it?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Actually, there aren't that many overseas, none of them are long or cost-effective. Some amusement parks have it (Disney World's "Train of Tomorrow,"). IIRC there's one in Osaka, Japan, but it runs wicked slow due to safety concerns.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&c2coff=1&q=Wickenburg+Arizona+maglev&spell= 1
... mumbling?
I am not an expert and I don't know what you are talking about A Coward, but Google pulls up nothing, you should maybe elaborate your
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Ha, but monorails aren't maglev.
So... quantum whatever... can I touch it? Without massive pain? What's it feel like?
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
Are you sure of that? I'm not sure, ahem, I mean I'm uncertain, that it's that easy to tell.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Its the Bose-Einstein condensate - and may I point out what a SHIT name this is for a form of matter.
.... etc... etc.... etc...
When you're naming a star, a hurricane, or a child you know you have a good chance of some more coming along later - so hell - John or Mary will do nicely.
But with forms of matter I think they missed a trick. Plasma is a pretty cool name after all. I would have thought a few minutes spent searching for the phone number for Douglas Adams and a quick "Hey - Doug - can I call you Doug - No? - Okay - Mr Adams - You were joking? - cool - very funny - ANyway - we have a new form of matter - and we can only think up really shit scientificy names for it - any chance of you coming up with some options we can present to the board? - None of your stupid numbers or shit - a proper kick ass name
You can order a maglev from Siemens, Germany, at any time. Provided you have a deep pocket.
The only one I can think of here in the UK is the one between Birmingham Airport and the Birmingham Exhibition Centres, if its still there, that is. I remember it about 10 years ago, maybe more.
TheHustler
http://www.elmarko.org/ - Useless bilge
http://www.asylum-games.co.uk/ - Co-Founder
Deborah Jin the team leader gives more of an idea of her work in this article. http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/4/7
Too bad he's dead, eh?
I'm not a Quantum Physicist by any stretch, just a Materials Engineer. But it seems to me that the condensates have a small issue about them. They seem to hold an extremely narrow definition of a material.
Considering solid, gases, liquids, and even plasmas, they all have a range of environmental factors within which they can exist and have some level of application/interaction to the rest of the newtonian universe. I'm not disputing that they are able to get all these little bits together, but at a billionth of a fraction above absolute zero? That's going to make for a pretty cold ride on the maglev
Actually they DID call up Douglas Adams and ask him for a name to give their new form of matter, but the only reply he would give is "I'm fucking dead!"
I think they picked the lesser of two evils when went with "Bose-Einstein condensate"...
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
If you want the actual paper, and have access to the journal, it's published on the online version of Physics Review Letters Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 040403 (2004)
abstract here for those with access.
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.
While it's impossible to tell from this shitty article what was actually observed, it's clear that this super-low-temperature experiment has nothing to do with high-Tc superconductivity. At least not more than a million previous experiments; a more likely candidate would have been experiments done long ago on superfluid 3He.
When will this matter?
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
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.
Or rather, I believe they claim to already have something at least functionally similar if not equivalent to a room temperature superconductor... I wonder how much of this is hype and how much of this is reality. I've actually had the chance to read what they handed out to prospective investors, and although I admit I have a very limited background, the "fluff content" seemed to be backed by relatively stable facts beside the fact that they didn't give away exactly how they pulled it off (for what I suspect are rather clear "or you'd try it to" reasons). I dunno, just thought it was interesting.
Most of the modern coasters use linear motors to launch the trains, so better conductors and magnets would make the launch systems faster (and cheaper) :-)
Perhaps we can see someone building something to beat the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point for being the tallest, fastest coaster (when its working).
http://www.ultraconductors.com/ *feels stupid* I don't deserve to be a /.er
"Bose-Einstein condensate" was created in 1995, Douglas Adams was very much alive and kicking.
The fifth? You don't remember? Pink hair, spoke with an accent, she ran off with that bald taxi driver... saved the world. Sheesh, some people.
.... after reading that I needed some supercooled gas to translate the bahavi- oops, heh, I'll stop there.
4am... Am I crazy, or is there something erotic about this artical?-
"What we've done is create this new exotic form of matter," Deborah
"It is a scientific breakthrough in providing a new type of quantum mechanical behavior," added Jin.
"This is very similar to what happens to electrons in a superconductor," Jin said.
"Our atoms are more strongly attracted to one another than in normal superconductors," she said.
I think this is possibly a big step towards room temperature superconductivity. The point is that in normal (even high Tc) superconductors, the forces between the cooper pairs are rather weak, hence the need to cool to at least 70K or so to get the effect. In this fermionic stuff, the force is a little stronger (at least, this is claimed in the article). Thus it may be possible to design a material which uses the same principle as the fermionic gas but in the form of a solid material at say 300K (just as high Tc superconductors are essentially solid B-E condensates, more or less).
BTW, I'm a cosmologist, not a condensed matter person, so I could be talking out of my arse.
The world is everything that is the case
Okay, I'm all for more efficient generators and maglev trains, but I'd really like to see transporters, warp drive, photon torpedos or at the very least a good tricorder.
Any chance the *next* form of matter can help here?
Here's the original (and official in my book) article. /. article." Lo and behold it shows up here. Damn work for blocking non .gov addresses!!
I read this yesterday and thought to myself "wow this would make a great
I'm sure there's a superconductor engineer reading this somewhere, but in the meantime I'll point out that we don't really know what causes superconductivity. Cooper pairs are a good theory, but haven't been proven to be the cause. So coming up with a substance that is similar to a thing that might cause superconductivity is hopeful, but let's not get carried away.
Cheers, Paul
You're thinking of monorails.
This is a maglev.
It routinely does 267 mph.
does it matter? or does it anti-matter?
thank you, i wondered if someone would think of that!!!
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Why, by making an observation of course! After that their quantum state collapses to just one state, either a real or an armchair quantum physicist.
The problem is that you'll either be able to read what they wrote, or determine how intelligent the post is -- but by knowing one, the other is forever lost. Quite the quantum quandry!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Seeing as this form of matter only exists at billionth of a degree C above absolute zero, I can see this as being useful only for New York trains in the winter. . .
Unless I am mistaken, it should probably say "extremely old form of matter".
The future used to be better in the old days...
You need a phone into Heaven (or Hell)to do that ...
:)
unfortunately his preface to H2G2 didn't give *that* number
Whoa! Who said Springfield is in Illinois? Isn't the whole idea of Springfield that it is in every state? If there's proof it's in Illinois, please point the way.
Thats Springfield, USA.
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?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
a non-experimental, longer than a few showcase miles (shanghai?), continuously functional, and most importantly ECONOMICAL maglev
i can prorbably order a space shuttle too... so what?
the tracks are just too expensive dude, the economics will never see a real useful maglev
we can have my rocket cars too... but the economics don't work, that's the real issue, not if you can order it or not
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Only a dare? I would think most people would hold out for the TRIPLE DOG DARE before fusing their tongue to a cold lightpost in the dead of winter... :)
what about carbon nanotubes? are(n't) they strong enough?
I'm not sure if that was ever a Maglev, in any case I think it only worked for a year or so before it was shut down for years and years and years now it has re-opened and is pulled round the track by big cables - it's definatley not a maglev any longer
And exactly who the hell do these guys thing they are? "New form of matter?" "Created?" Should I expect a patent soon?
Ok, so we've got Potassium atoms forming Coopers pairs. In a normal Superconductive state, Coopers pairs are electrons which have opposite spin, thus resulting in a net spin of 0. Because this is a whole integer spin, they behave like bosons (according to Bose-Einstein statistics) rather than fermions. In short, they behave more like photons than electrons.
Now, according to this more informative article that someone already linked to,
"Interestingly, the constituents of matter - protons, neutrons and electrons - are all fermions, whereas a composite particle, such as an atom, is a boson if the total number of protons, neutrons and electrons is even, and a fermion if the total number is odd."
Is it that simple to make a whole atom behave like a boson? Weird.
(One more thing... According to somewhere on Wikipedia, a proton's spin is 1/2... So if you have (-?)1/2 spin from the proton, and (?-)1/2 spin from the electron in a Hydrogen atom, how DOESN'T it behave like a boson?)
Eh? How is phototropism even vaguely related to sentience?
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Yeah... i heard it really put them on the map..
Along with Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook.
I'm allowed to call watercooling-idiots... "IDIOTS!"
Ouch. It's too early in the morning for jokes like that. My cheeks ran into my eyelids when I tried to laugh.
Yes, fermions (particle with spin which is an odd multiple of 1/2) are different beasts than bosons (with integer spin) and fermions cannot form Bose-Einstein condensate but fermions can form pairs that are bosonic. It has been observed in many cases. Superfluid He-3 (which is fermionic) requires fermion pairing and it has been observed quite long ago (and given 1996 Nobel Prize in physics). So getting Bose-Einstein condensate from rubidium atoms is interesting research but this is not a breakthrough and not a "sixth state of matter". This is still Bose-Einstein condensate but made not from atoms but pairs of atoms.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
I've seen lots of posts saying "this has nothing to do with room temperature superconductors, but really cold gasses!" and whatnot.
The point is that the pairing formation of these fermions is potentially related to the Cooper pairing in electrons (also fermions). While it obviously isn't going to lead directly to a high temperature superconductor, the better we understand the mechanism IN GENERAL, the easier it will be for materials scientists and other condensed matter physicists to start figuring out how to get the critical temperature of REGULAR, SOLID superconductors up.
In that regard, this is big news.
Are you BioCurious?
That's the fifth element, you boron.
The problem is that Maglev tracks are an order of magnitude more expensive to build than railways, which kinda dwarfs the potential benefits.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Quite a few Big Ideas writers badly overestimated the time needed to land on the Moon, and were rather surprised by the 1969 date. Of course, in everything afterwards they were terribly optimistic.
Fusion reactors and lasers are just slower than originally thought. Fusion is very close, and basically reduced to an engineering problem at this point. Giant laser weapons are at hand, and are the subject of at least a couple of military projects slated to go into service Real Soon Now. (And I mean they're already built and working, just not in production.)
The main problem with widespread personal air transport is that it's harder to fly a plane than it is to drive a car, and managing traffic and congestion are much harder. Both problems should gradually go away as computers get more advanced. Have patience.
Making tiny things can also be a way to a Big Idea; have a look at carbon nanotubes and the space elevator concept for example. Quite a few Big Ideas have been held up because of the lack of good materials, and the making-tiny-things field (I won't call it nanotech because that carries a truckload of undeserved connotations) can help out a lot in the materials science area.
Your sentence needs one small but extremely important addition, IMO. "It's interesting how all the big ideas of the 1940s and 1950s have come to nothing as of January 2004."
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
mod parent down; this is bogus for any number of reasons, the most important of which is that NO ROOM TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTORS HAVE EVER BEEN DOCUMENTED, regardless of T_c/H_c/J_c characteristics. I call shenanigans.
my other lambda is a Y
They cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree C above absolute zero or minus 459 degrees F
Uhum.. That's quite a bit colder than the temperature at the south pole of mars, where Nasa lost a lander because they mixed up some units.. We should have learned a lesson there: don't mix up units. hint.
So a better version could be something like this:
They cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree C above absolute zero or minus 273,15 degrees C
Agreed, I might be a bit pedantic about this for some, or I might just dislike the degrees F scale.. But it remains a good advice.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Put it down to age and reading the word "room" in the article: it wasn't deliberate.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
But I study to become one.
Essentially, you have two types of particles. Bosons, of which there can exist infinitely many in the same state (place, time, energy and such), and fermions, of which no two can occupy the same state. For the more physics geek among us: Bosons have an integral spin, fermions have halve-valued spins.
In superconducting material, two electrons (fermions) bind together to form a boson (2 x 1/2 = integer), which form a sort of Bose-Einstein condensate in matter, creating superconduction. (This is a higher hand-waving physics explanation, but this space is too short to explain it fully).
What the news is now, is that they have now done this, not for electrons in a material, but for actual atoms. Not sure how this can be used for superconduction at high (liquid nitrogen) temperatures though.
So we have Earth, Water, Wind and Fire???? What is the fifth ;)
As cunning as a fox, which has just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University. http://www.kinlan.co
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.
from the article:
"They cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree C above absolute zero or minus 459 degrees F -- which is the point at which matter stops moving. "
So you have something that could bring a superconductor closer, which would save HUUUGGGEEE amount of energy. Only 1 thing... you need to cool it down to minus 459 degrees F. And that would cost exactly how much energy???
armchair physicists and real working physicists are distinguishable particles. Unlucky for us, you need an expensive detector (like a grad. degree in physics) to tell them apart.
Then the cooling is almost only a one time expense...
The Amazing Properties of Aerogel
The only maglev train in the U.S. that I am aware of is a prototype at Old Dominion University. This project was started several years ago and has yet to be completed due to insufficient funding (or running way over budget). ODU press release
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.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
...are the electircal engineer's wet dream. If this research really materializes in some technology and real world aplications, not only would it make our engineer's lives easier (no resitance, less heat, less heat radiating surface, more powerful and energy efficient motors) but also benefit society as a whole (less emissions). Unless they patent it the next day and require six figure licensing fees.
On the other hand potassium is *very* reactive.
There's no such thing as "a degree K". It's simply "a Kelvin".
Exactly. At low enough temperature spin 1/2 particles (fermions) - like He-3, potassium or even electrons - can "pair off". The resulting composite particle is called a "Cooper pair". It has integer spin and may therefore condense into a Bose-Einstein condensate.
I'm not sure who is responsible for this hyperbole about "creating a new form of matter", but it is shameless. But hey, it made the news...
It's only for tax reasons.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Just admit it; you took a freebie, something which has advantaged you, and you didn't pay for it.
Yeah and I bet he and his parents paid absolutely no taxes at all. What a bunch of ungrateful leeches.
That's the problem with socialists, they steal your money at the point of the gun and when they give some of it back they act like they did you a favor. Yeesh.
Are you claiming Nobel was American?
Actually, I thought there were a lot of German guys who helped the US build those first atomic bombs...oh, and let's not forget the ones who stayed in Germany and *tried* to make one.
Luckily the Americans invented "saving Europe from itself" as well.
Hmm.
"Scientists create new way to blow up lightbulbs."
Cool.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Seriously, explain to me why this is a troll?
A lot of people seem to be saying this has nothing to do with superconductivity and the scientists are deliberately misleading the press. The success of the group was the formation of this condonsate at such a high temperature. I know it doesn't sound high, but it is orders of magnitude above when such a condensate should theoretically form. They acheived this by manipulating other factors in the materials local environment (a particular magnetic field). Superconductors form a similar condensate and if the condonsate could be formed at higher temperature by changing some environmental factor other than temperature, it may be possible to create a room temperature superconductor. I think thats the point that was been made and would have been one of the motivating factors for the research.
The main problem with widespread personal air transport is that it's harder to fly a plane than it is to drive a car, and managing traffic and congestion are much harder. Both problems should gradually go away as computers get more advanced. Have patience.
Alright, I'll chime in here. First off, when the flying cars were first envisioned, the dynamics of the situation weren't fully realized.
That said, let's talk about body first. To make a flying car that is practical, it must be drivable on existing roads at speeds we're used to. Considering that there would quickly be legislation limiting flying areas in cities or eliminating them entirely, we must expect to still road the cars frequently for city driving. That means that aerodynamically, the car needs to be designed to stay on the ground. This is completely counter to the goals of anything that flies, where they need to have lift surfaces and so forth.
Then you get dead weight. That's everything in your car that doesn't make it fly while you're flying, and everything that doesn't make it drive while you're driving. More on this later.
Next problem: power source. It's possible, but unlikely to be useful to use the same engine for flying that you use for driving. However, existing street-legal IC engines do not have enough power to push the car on the ground and drive a propellor that is tough and fast enough to life the car, assuming you deal with the aerodynamic problems previously mentioned. So you need to split up the jobs somehow. It's my opinion that the solution lies in electrical motors at each wheel for road-driving and electrically-driven turbines. Either would be dead weight at certain times, but could be build small enough not to impact weight that much.
Then you've got the whole wing issue, and lift surface problem. It'd be great if some new scientific breakthrough enabled us to generate/use gravity waves to lift and drive the car, thus eliminating almost everything I've mentioned already, but it's not here and now. Here and now it's damned impossible to build a car that can fly, road properly, and still run on an IC engine, because of the lift surfaces required to do so. Assuming you can get the same IC engine to drive and spin a propeller, straighten out the body so it can lift when it needs to and stick to the road when it needs to, you'll still need wings and a tail, and that crap just doesn't fit in the lane. So it needs to fold out, and your problem has just multiplied itself into oblivion. Outside of that, hovering is an excellent option, but since hovering is a brute force method, it becomes very expensive in terms of power requirements.
When a small, portable electrical power source can be built, flying cars will become at least approachable in a practical sense. So we're either waiting for someone to design a generator that fits under the hood of your car or we're waiting for cold fusion. And that's just the start of solving this problem.
Like what I said? You might like my music
mod parent down; this is bogus for any number of reasons, the most important of which is that NO ROOM TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTORS HAVE EVER BEEN DOCUMENTED, regardless of T_c/H_c/J_c characteristics. I call shenanigans.
Call shenanigans all you want, but if you actually understood the post, you would have understood that he was talking about a superconductor that conducted, got too hot, and wasn't capable of conducting anymore. It was still a superconductor in the sense that it was a broken superconductor. I got a light laugh off of it, at least.
In the meantime, I suggest you do with your mod points as you will, and the rest of us will use ours as we will. We don't need you to tell us how to mod.
Like what I said? You might like my music
On what basis do you not "superconductors becoming feasable (sic) at room temperatures anytime soon (i.e. 100 years)"? Do you have any reasoning to back up this position?
I have a BS in Physics, and I worked for Drs. Sheng and Shams on the high Tc superconductivity project at the University of Arkansas (as a lab grunt). Superconductivity was for a very long time only found in the domain of a few degrees celsius above absolute zero. Absolute zero is about 270 degrees celsius below freezing, or about 290 degrees below room temperature. When the only superconductors known worked at these temperatures, your position of disregarding the possibility of room temperature superconductivity made sense.
Then the first high temperature superconductors were discovered, and now we know of substances that superconduct at well over liquid nitrogen temperatures. I believe the highest temperature right now is about 130 or 140 kelvins, about halfway from absolute zero to room temperature. Well, there are no special properties associated with -140 C like there are with near absolute zero. Molecules and atoms are whizzing around at breakneck speed. To claim resolutely that superconductivity can happen at those temperatures, but not at room temperatures, is crazy.
We don't have a good model of superconductivity. I can't project when we'll discover room temperature superconductors; until we have a good model no one can. However, when we've already made one jump of about 70 C in superconducting temperature, and climbed another 50-70 C in less than 15 years since that jump, it seems pretty precipitous to claim, with apparently no knowledge whatsoever in the field, that we won't make the remaining 160 degrees C any time in the near future.
"Only one fermion of a given type is allowed to be in a specific quantum state. A quantum state is a discrete level that can be labeled. The labeling gives information about the spatial characteristics (e.g. the orbit) and the spin of the particle. Two electrons can exist in the same quantum orbital, but only if they have different spin states. No two electrons of the same spin can occupy the same orbital state. "
That's why this is interesting.
yeah, I've got a degree in it. But engineering pays better.
Just google for "Pauli Exclusion Principle" and Fermion.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
for me superconductors are ONLY magnets. kinda like make ANY shape with copper wire, cool down and add charge, presto a "permanent magnet".
Can't you add a resistor to prevent blowing up the light bulb? Yeah, yeah, then what's the point of having a superconductor in the first place, right?
How about in phone lines? Internet lines? How would just having the wire itself be really really fast affect the whole system? In some places, that would move the bottleneck to the routers and switches, but have a net result of a speed increase.
Of course, the prospect of having a really powerful motor that runs on a 9v battery is sweet! Could they make a motor that'll drive my truck and only run on a bank of AA batteries? ;)
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Luckily the Americans invented "saving Europe from itself" as well.
;)
We all make mistakes.
Go ahead, mod me down. I have the karma to burn. Anti US comments get modded up, but anything anti Euro gets modded down, even it it's true
This will not do! I demand that the scientists come up with a name for this stuff that is more fun. You just can't use this properly in sci-fi films. Observe:
Captain Shamerica: Cease and desist, foul scum!
Grokthor: Never! *rowr*
Captain Shamerica: Then I shall blast you with my fermionic condensate ray!
See? Poor Captain Shamerica now looks like a pussy because he's using some weirdo-thingy to whack the bad guys.
New name! New name! *forms picket line*
Blog,Twitter
We are, in fact, essentially certain that the BCS theory of superconductivity is correct for ordinary superconducting metals. As the previous poster pointed out, its precise predictions have been so incredibly good for the past few decades that the physics (and engineering) community are completely satisfied. That said, there is a class of superconducting compounds (high-Tc superconductors) that we really don't understand. These compounds are generally kinds of ceramic, so they don't conduct at ALL at room temperature, but become superconducting at temperatures up to more than 100K (compared to about 4K for the standard metals). And THAT being said, it's still true that this discovery may have nothing to do with superconductors at all.
It's not really that simple. The hydrogen atom (taken as a whole) is ALWAYS a boson, there's no doubt about that - the spins add up right. What you are asking about, however, is whether you can see any interesting condensation effects because of it. That turns out to be very difficult to arrange. You need to get a whole bunch of hydrogen atoms together in exactly the same state (no excited states, and they all must be moving with the same velocity). More importantly, quantum effects (like condensation) only become important when the (excuse the jargon) wavefunctions of the particles begin to substantially overlap. Basically, the "particles" are a little smeared out by quantum mechanics, and you only get quantum weirdness when these smears overlap. The size of the smear is inversely proportional to the mass of the object. Hydrogen atoms are 2000 times heavier than electrons, and so they have to be brought to very high densities before they can behave this way. The upshot is that the only way we know to do this is to bring the atoms to a nearly dead stop (hence EXTREME cold) in a small region and watch the magic happen. So the atoms are always boson, but only under extreme conditions do we care.
The light bulb is the resistor. The resistance of the wires is negligible by comparison, and replacing them with superconducting wires would have no ill effect. The original poster is talking nonsense.
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This year one of the nobel prizes in physics went to Tony Legget who explained experiments over twenty years ago in which Helium 3, when cooled low enough exhibited superfluidity. In this scenario the Helium 3 which is a fermion pairs up much like low Tc cooper pairing (except in a p-wave state). This allows it to flow without resistance in addition to giving it interesting magnetic properties. What I would like to know is how this experiment is different from the experimental work on Helium 3. It seems that both involve pairing of fermion atoms to form bosons, except that somehow in this example there are charge carriers... Does someone have a reference to the article at the preprint archive (or in a journal)?
Ah, thank you. I thought there was something wrong with it, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. :)
Of course, he completely understated the usefulness of his "magnet" as well, considering how much of our society is powered by electro-magnetism. :)
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I finally get to use my croatian knowledge for something ....
Here we go:
Huge Discovery
Danijel Djurek manufactured a techologically revolutionary material that helps conserve energy.
Croatian physycist discovered a conductor of electicity without resistance. Even though results are verified additional investigation is still needed according to Mladen Prester from the Physics Institute
Conduction of electiricity without loss and vehicles which with their small electrical motors travel thousands of kilometars [without recharching i guess] will soon be an everyday occurance. This revlutionary discovery, a material composed of led, silver, oxygen and water [maybee hydrogen], surounded by [i think] copper, performs as a superconductor, insists the croatian physisist Dr. Danijel Djurek. The global independant labaratory already verified this croatian scientists discovery and have announced a new technological revolution.
Some are skeptical
The quest for superconductivity, transfer of electricity without loss resulting from resistance, lasted 15 years. Massive production of wires and the installation of new materials in various compontens, ie. speakers and electrical motors, should begin in the upcoming months in Croatia and should expand throughout the world afterwards. If it suceeds, a new industrial branch should make a contribution to croatian economy.
The world acknowledges
In order for a scientific discovery to be acknowledged and subsequently published in various journals it has to be verified by independent labaratories whose members are secretely selected by teams of particular journals. Dr. Danijel Djurek's discovery has been given the green light by the independant labaratory. As a result of which an article in The Economist, Scientific American, New Scientist and a scientifict brach of New York Times, about the new superconductive material has been published. This is a landmark discovery for technology and [maybee economy, not sure]. With current techniques, transmition over high power electrical lines, results in a loss of 30% of the manufactured power. An additional 20% is lost at the consumer level. The new material is not only ecologically acceptable and will save electrical energy, time and money - said Dr. D. Djurek. Despite the support of coleagues and scientists from other parts of the word and a despite a worldwide [maybee global] ackowledgment many remain skeptical becuase Djurek's material does not emit a magnetic field. More correcty, Meissner's [something maybee work] which was though to be required in order for a material to be superconductive.
I will continue in next post as it is not relevant to discussion any more but will be there in case you want to read.
When you see hype like this, they are gunning for the Nobel prize. I doubt they'll grant one for fermiotic matter, since it is an extension of the efforts that creatic Einstein-Bose matter and won the nobel in the late 1990s.
That even with the so-called "pros," much of the ideas associated with quantum dynamics is theory. While some is based on real physical phenomenon (the particle/wave duality of light for example), other ideas, like the notion that there exist quantum entities that float around in spacetime (moving backward and forward in time - we notice their presence only when they happen to share the same point in spacetime that we occupy), qualify as nothing more than "the best way we can think of at the moment to explain what we see." Fortunately, a good imagination doesn't require a PhD in quantum physics.
Okay, what was the fifth?
Mila Jovovich. Duh.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Actually...if I remember right, they do.
or at least they did in one episode.
You're all bastards!
Note these new states of matter occur at super-cold or super-hot conditions. At super-cold the atoms stop motion and engage in bizaire quantum mingled quantum states. You needed a micro-degree about absolute zero for Bose matter and a nano-degee for fermatic matter.
There was a physics conference earlier in january debating whether gluon plasmas have been seen or not. When you heat and collide protons to billions of degrees, almost the speed of light, they may just merge into one big quark soup, not seen since the Big Bang.
Here we go again. There are some mentally deranged individuals on this board that clearly have a low self esteem, otherwise they would not make such a half-assed comment. The EU does a lot more fundamental research than applied research, and that is why it may seem that the EU does not "create" things: You won't see highly theoretical papers in these popular scientific magazines. Also, research is not that jazzed up by the media as it is in the US.
But go ahead, feel superior, you probably need it.
Great, so now matter can take its A-levels. Now they've just got two years to create a university for it!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
IIRC, Potassium is a solid at room temperature, not to mention at absolute zero.
So why does the article say potassium gas? Did they mean a gaseous potassium compound? Or am I just missing something?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
i apologize, "never" was a poorly chosen word, "in our lifetimes" might suffice, sorry, thanks ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Kraljevic supported investigation
Former minister of science and technology, Hrvoje Kraljevic, physist, during his mandate financally supported Djurek's work, but as he remembers, the project was not close to completion and subsequent application in everyday life such as what Dr. Djurek is discussing today. Superconductive materials exists, but currently they function at extremely low temperatures close to absolute zero. They are applied today only in special cases. Djurek's superconductive materijal supposedly functions at a much higher temperature of -70 degrees [most likely celsius]. The problem is, as far as i understand it, that it is only superconductive on surface. I don't know whether he was able to perfect his design in the meantime -explains prof. Kraljevic. He adds that the discovery of a superconductive material which would function at fairly normal temperatures would be really revolutionally. (I.K.)
Discovery verified
The material [could also be The topic] is very delicate. Dr. D. Djurek's discovery has been verified and the results held their ground. However, Meissner's [something maybee field] is missing. I am assuming it has to do with a type of superconductivity - called hyperconductivity. Additional investigation is necessary - said Dr. Mladen Prester of Zagreb's Physics Institute. The fact that the new material is mising magnetic [i think field's] makes it better for application since superconductive properties extends all the way till 400 degrees celsius, insist Djurek. Even though new technology may improve the local economy, he [there] won't see increased earnings from the superconductive discovery. It is very expensive to patent a new material. When we were suppose to protect manufacturing, croatian government was not interested in the project. Its important that the discovery will improve the overall global economy - concluded Djurek. Croatian physisit Today Dr. Danijel Djurek will annouce/present his discovery to the croatian public.
Article written by Zoran Turkovic
pheeeeeeeeew. that was tough.
Quote from Jin in the article:
Or superconductors could allow for the invention of magnetically levitated trains, she added.
COULD? They're already here, Jin. Where have you been?
Crime? Hunger? Even longevity is beneficially affected by education.
You forgot to mention drug use (including alcohol and cigarettes), teen pregnancy, depression, abuse, run-aways, and suicide.
Education is the silver bullet.
Education is the silver bullet.
There's a VERY detailed article about the whole thing over at Physics Web.
Wherever you go, there I am...
isn't this the same stuff they bounced off the deflector dish into the dying planet's atmosphere in phase with the warp shield generators to buy them 2 more minutes to beam up the last of the landing party in star trek episode #134?
or was that the nonphasic tachyon particles they bought form the romulan arms dealer?
sorry, i get confused...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
DANIEL DUREK TOUGH That it is THE PRODUCT Technology REVOLUTIONARY MATERIAL FOR U(C)TEDU Energies
Croatian physicist I found out medium tide free of wiry
Upshot have been checked, than destitute of have been add istral(ivanja, kal(e Bridegroom Transplanted substance with Institute for for physics
transference tide free of loss plus cars w - Unveiling had with substructure meaning for technology plus menage. Danaa;njim technique, over transference dalekovodima, get lost 30 percentages appointed electricial energies, and joa; 20 percentages get lost with potroa;ac(a. Late material, short of a;to had ecologist receivable, considerably bi ua;tedio electricial vim, and hereby plus money kazao had dr. D. ?urek.
in spite podra;ci cooperator plus literary man with latter area these international worship, many have been jealous because does with ?urekova material does not izbacuje magnetic field. Toc(nije, does not have Meissnerova capacity who does yet deemed terms that some material bude supravodljiv.ho with little boy electric motor verge thousand kilometer soon would to become svakodnevicom. Revolutionary unveiling, material joint with lead, srebra, oxygen plus watery, dressing bakrom who transference does not get lost vim, tough Croatian physicist dr. Daniel ?urek. World Day independent laboratory already have been confirmer unveiling Croatian literary man plus usher in novu technology revoluciju.
certain have been jealous
lookout for supravodljivosti, toc(nije, for conductivity tide free of electrically wiry plus back to back loss, uninterrupted had 15 year. Bulky manufacturing l(ica with learner material plus his installation into a unit, for example, megaphone plus electric motor, is required bi begin already next month in Croatia these does proa;iriti per world. Thrive li, money industry spray is required bi considerably help Croatian menage.
Unveiling acknowledged
- Object had distinctly scabrous. Unveiling dr. D. ?ureka acknowledged had plus upshot stoje. Than, missing Meissnerov capacity. Deemed that it is a word about podrvrsti supravodljivosti hipervodljivosti. Destitute of have been add istral(ivanja he said dr. Bridegroom Transplanted substance from an zagrebac(kog Institute for for physics.
this a;to with learner material to leave out magnetic capacity, bolje had as they apply to because does supravodljiva features protel(u yet up to 400 Celzijevih stagger, tough ?urek. Though would money technology up front home menage, greater than wage with unveiling supravodljivosti will not have.
- Patentiranje learner material had expensively. When smo is required zaa;tititi the product, Croatian mastery haven't bile interested in for project. Intrinsically is that would unveiling yield upgrowth svjetskom menage in summary had ?urek.
Croatian physicist dr. Daniel ?urek features would unveiling today lie between Croatian world.
Zorana Turkovic'
world admitting
yes we do bi scientifically unveiling whether unquestioned these objavljeno into a workman-like magazine, moraju ga uphold independent laboratory which haply into a privity selection workman-like timovi particular person magazine. Unveiling hrvtskog physicist dr. Danijela ?ureka independent laboratory dali have been green light these had writing about learner supravodljivom material objavljen into a The Economistu, Unisci, Scientific Americanu, New Scientistu plus scientifically feuilleton Big Apple Hereby. prince podupro istral(ivanje
Biva;i minister lore plus technologies Hrvoje Prince, physicist, for svog mandate ?urekov had workmanship financial podupro, limit how many does memories, project is not been nor near site appliances into a commuter l(ivotu, whereof ?urek today rumour has it.
- Percentages supravodljivi materialist, but they operation at an distinctly niskim temperature which does Cretean about absolute nule. Primjenjuju does today into a certain specific situation. ?urekov supravodljivi material would-be o
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Surely the remaining proponents of the Big Ideas should have learned to stay quiet by now?
What an awful thought. I certainly hope that nobody with ideas stays quiet. It is the clash and ferment of ideas, good and bad, that lead us on.
stupidly I was refering to the previous name without being explicit about this - now roughly 300 people have told me that Mr Adams is dead, a fact I know and feel bad about every time I think 'i didnt finish that dirk gently book' - i didnt finish it because neither did he!
Pratchett is funny - but with no disrespect to the man, Adams pisses all over his big funny hat!
I'm just curious how you differentiate the "real physical phenomena" from the other stuff -- what is Newtonian physics, for example, except a best-guess explanation of observed phenomona? And we know that we we see can often mislead us. What makes duality "real" but Feynman sum-over-histories "unreal"?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Maglev's are cool.
and sure everything that seems cool has to be a bit pricey. But, like so many other cool civil engineering/construction type projects I don't understand why they are soo, soo expensive.
Take the International Space Station, sure, putting a science base the size of a soccer pitch into space must cost a lot but why does it cost the billions upon billions it supposably costs? surely a few thousand steal beams and few hundred computer chips etc. doesn't cost 100's of billions.
The same goes for maglev. If this is the case, the main problem needing to be overcome is not a need for new/cheaper technology but a need to cut out the waist.
Anyone actually know why maglev (and the ISS for that matter) costs so much?
Maybe any quantum physicists around can tell us more about this, but it certainly sounds pretty revolutionary
so, would you say that this matters a lot?
eh.
not so much replying to the comment as to the sig. I would hate to have edit to posts.
Someone posts: Would you really like to see a ditro grandma can use?
I say: Yea, I'd like to see it, and im sure other's would too. And I know my grandma wants it.
Someone edits so now reads: I like to run naked on the weekends. I'm hung like a horse, you wanna see?
think about the dangers.
Not true. One of the early researchers (Chu?) claimed in the major peer-reviewed journal (Physics Review: Condensed Matter????) that he BRIEFLY had a sample of the perovskite superconductor that worked at room temperature. In those days the product wasn't very stable and this particular one soon stopped working at room temperature. I don't remember the time frame, but my impression was that this was on the order of a few days.
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Rail Guns
As far as I know Springfield in the Simpons has never been localized into a specific state. In fact, they often make fun of the fact that nobody knows where Springfield is.
During one episode in elementary school they pull out a U.S. map and talk about Springfield with a pointer, but Lisa's head gets in the way so that the "camera" can't see the map.
-- laws are the opinions of politicians --
Depending, of course, on how much said room temperature superconductors cost...
The oil cartels will probably have something to say (or do) about any practical application of this technology.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
consumes 30% of generated power in transit.
Superconductor research (especially that which works at "room temperature") could be immediately applied to this problem once refined, drastically reducing energy costs and our largest source of pollution.
The sooner, the better, I say.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
So they make all these claims about superconductivity when they have pairs of atoms? Doesn't that seem stupid? How would you carry charge (i.e. electricity) with these neutral particles? So how would you build a superconductor with these thingies?
/. linked to, nor the abstract talk about charged particles.
It also comes no surprise that the Cooper pair's attractive force is stronger than in the electron-electron case -- there is no repulsive Coulomb force between atoms.
It sure sounds like someone made up a sensationalist story around some interesting, but not sensational, research.
Note: I could only read the abstract of the Phys Rev Letters article, not the article itself. Maybe they're talking about ions. But neither the article
"Not fair! You changed the outcome of the race by observing it!"
What's the atomic weight of Bolonium?
Didn't the Behind the Music episode call them as a 'northern Kentucky' family? Not just bringing it up because I'm from Kentucky, but still...
They confined the gas in a vacuum chamber and used magnetic fields and laser light to manipulate the potassium atoms into pairing up. Why don't they just say thatt he scientists did a bunch of Star Trek shit anf get it over with?
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
Typical fluff piece. Fermionic condensates are about as useful as Bose-Einstein condensates, which is to say they aren't useful at all. The only thing Fermi condensates and Cooper pairs have in common is the fact that they're both collections of fermions which follow Fermi-Dirac statistics. These fermionic condensates exist at ultralow temperatures which can only be reached via sophisticated laser cooling methods. High Tc superconductors can function at temperatures above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, and even then they still have limited practical applications. I'm sure these researchers will get millions of dollars in new grant money, but don't expect any technological breakthroughs as a result of this discovery.
"sixth form of matter"
So, let's count, shall we - we have:
1. Solid.
2. Liquid
3. Gas
4. Plasma
5. Bose-einstein condensate
7. Nemetic liquid crystals
8. Smetic liquid crystals
9. The other type of liquid crystals whoes name escapes me
10. Glass (Arguable)
11. That funky stuff that neurtron stars are made of
12-15 truely wierd QM stuff, like charmonium
And now, the newest member: 6
Maybe, just maybe, that's an over hyped term. There are lot's of states of matter. I've probably missed some.
Can we please kill the meme that there are only a very small number.
Yours, a miffed quantum materials physicist
Good point, the teachers make the biggest difference in education. A good teacher can get a kid to want to learn and succed while a bad one will kill his/her motivation in no time flat. Math and English teachers especially.
How about... Step 1. Freeze until cold cold cold (like a regular superconductor) Step 2. Reengineer humans to be comfortable at near absolute temperatures and lower room temperature accordingly. Step 3. Have a room temperature superconductor Step 4. PROFIT!!!!
No, it is the one that distinguishes between city and country in evaluating evidence for rape as opposed to consensual fornication. The penalty for rape is death. The penalty for fornication is paying the bride price or else at least marrying the girl.
Exodus 22:16,17 If a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins.
The reference to fields you are thinking of concerns accusations of rape. The problem is that women back then could falsely accuse men of rape, just like today. So if the alleged rape occurred in the city, a charge of rape could be challenged if neighbors did not hear the girls screams or sounds of a struggle. However, if the alleged rape occurred in the field (i.e. in the boonies), then the girls testimony had more weight because "the damsel cried, and there was none to save her". So you didn't want to mess around with country girls. Deuteronomy 22:23-29 Notice that while the penalty for consensual fornication was fairly lenient, the penalty for adultery, even when consensual, was death.
Also, notice that the legal arrangements given to Israel for how to deal with bad behaviour (like when to execute alleged rapists) were specifically for Israel, and while worthy of consideration for a Gentile or secular government, are not directly applicable. The moral prescriptions, e.g. "thou shalt not commit adultery", are generally applicable.
They know right from wrong and its' full of good people even if their economic laws are a bit totalitarian.
They saved the world during the cold war and always came in on the right side (however late) during the two world wars.
Needle Nardle Noo
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2004 and provide the ability to edit posts?
No forum should provide the ability to edit posts -- although I wouldn't argue against an option to delete one's own posts (leaving some kind of "deleted by author" tombstone).
I'm not going to go into the arguments again -- I developed the (text based) CoSy computer conferencing software (used by BIX, CIX, a number of universities, NLzero, etc) about 20 years ago, and that request crops up from time to time. I'll never allow it in my software, and won't use any forum that permits it.
The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.
-- Alastair
How about the condensed matter that white dwarf stars are made of? Nuclei bouncing about in an electron soup. Heat it and it shrinks! This stuff is held up by the Pauli exclusion principle for crying out loud, it has to be another form of matter
How about neutronium? this stuff is weird, governed by the strong force.
They're claiming this is the 6th form of matter, and that BEC's were the fifth, based on the fact that BECs are made of bosons, right?
= 57 0&ncid=753&e=3&u=/nm/20040128/sc_nm/science_matter _dc
_ ba ckground.htm
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid
"Bose-Einstein condensates are collections of thousands of ultracold particles that occupy a single quantum state -- they all essentially behave like a single, huge superatom. But Jin says these Bose-Einstein condensates are made with bosons, which like to act in unison."
Well, they're not. BECs are made of atoms too.
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/BEC
"Predicted in 1924 by Albert Einstein, who built on the work of Satyendra Nath Bose, the condensation occurs when individual atoms meld into a "superatom" behaving as a single entity at just a few hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero." "The team led by Cornell and Wieman used laser and magnetic traps to create the BEC, a tiny ball of rubidium atoms that are as stationary as the laws of quantum mechanics permit."
If something were formed from a collection of bosons that were quantally entangled, it wouldn't be a form of matter. Bosons are the force-carrying quanta, such as photons. They are energy, not matter.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
For instance, forcibly making slaves of your fellow Israelites was a capital offense. Furthermore, all slaves, whether foreign captives or debtors who sold themselves, had to be set free every 7 years. If a slave had such a kind master, that he preferred to remain a slave, he could do so by declaring it in front of the congregation and having his ear pierced as a sign. However, every 50 years was the year of Jubilee. All slaves had to then go free, even voluntary ones.
Yes, if the US had actually followed Biblical laws of slavery, it wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, if they had just followed the constitution - those born in America to slaves were naturalized citizens - and slaves working in America could apply for citizenship after 7 years - things would have been different.
In fact, in the early days, before the revolution, both Africans and Europeans came to America as indentured servants. They were essentially slaves for 7 years, and then received a lump sum payment and had the benefit of training in particular skills. If a master was abusive, his indentured servants would often run away. This was a big economic loss. African servants were a minority, and easier to find if they ran away. Africans gradually became preferred as indentured servants for this reason. Eventually, all indentured servants were African. The 7 year time limit was forgotten. By 1776, only a few free Africans remained, and they were in constant fear of being kidnapped as a slave. I am a little worried that the current immigrant worker situation is beginning to look too much like pre-revolutionary indentured service. Will it also turn into full fledged slavery for Hispanics in 100 years?
Like most evils, slavery in America developed gradually as people forgot existing just laws and began to tolerate new oppressive ones. Reminds me of the evolution of copyright law in America, from the Founding Fathers version to the DMCA.
Wow thanks dude, I was being completely serious. Now I know, and it's all because of you. Awesome.
These guys are condensed matter physicists. Anybody that goes by the title "quantum physicist" is likely a crank. I'm a quantum mechanician.
AlterSlash does a pretty good job of that actually.
DNA just wants to be free...
"Or superconductors could allow for the invention of magnetically levitated trains, she added. Free of friction they could glide along at high speeds using a fraction of the energy trains now use."
I can't wait until the invent those things. I've been waiting for years for someone to invent one.
Er, I mean, wow, what a great idea! I hope somebody invents those soon!
Er, I mean, wow, what a great idea! I've never heard of that invention! I can't believe they came upwith that new invention just now!
Does Indiana have a Crystal Lake?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Now, if the patented process turns out to be the only way to physically create the new form of matter, then yes, your fears will be realized. Darn, after all that research, the scientists are the only ones allowed to profit from their discovery!
The Ezine Directory
I submitted this story yesterday, as it was run on CNN...
What's a sig? Pete Brubaker
whether naotubes would be strong enough or not, that's a structural matter. Superconducting materials, OTOH, would (I imangine) be useful as a mechanism for moving cargo up the elevator.
I imagine this makes these CU physicists sure candidates for another nobel prize.
I feel honored to have taken physics at CU. (The #1 party school in America and a BADASS physics dept to boot!).
(sig intentionally left blank for Nobel Prize winner to fill out)
Uri Geller already had his mind completely over this matter. In fact, he bent it with his MIND!
There is no spoon, because Uri bent them all, the jerk!
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Okay, what was the fifth?
Heart. And what a terrible form of matter that was. All it could do was sit around talking to animals and bosons.
Erik
YOU ARE SAYING IMPUDENCE TO ME! THAT IS IMPUDENCE!
Who ever heard of a Cathode Ray anyway?
Darn right. I achieve enlightenment through Liquid Crystals.
Just abbreviate it, e.g. "... with my feco ray!"
Trust me. You do not want to see a feco ray (not work safe).
Funding is not the solution to the education crisis in the United States. There is already plenty of money being thrown at the problem.
The real problem is the layers of bureaucracy that the money has to filter through and the inane regulations that suppress out-of-the-box thinking and innovative solutions to educational problems.
The way you fix that is to completely divest the Federal Government from the education business. Dissolve the Department of Education, and reduce the taxes collected on the people at the federal level. That means dramatic reductions in income and payroll taxes.
The States would then have the ability to create and administrate an education system tailored to the specific needs of their socio-economic geography. And the liberated tax revenue of their citizens can be tapped to solve their issues.
You wouldn't need to set particular academic standards because private interests will rate the performance of states against each other, much like J.D. Power and Associates or Consumer Reports and other auditing firms compare companies and product lines.
The result is that the States will be forced to innovate to compete with fellow states, the the educational effectiveness of their programs will entice businesses and people to relocate.
This approach could be used for health care, education, welfare, social security, and pretty much anything that the federal government has a habit of screwing up.
Let the states compete for tax base, and let them have the responsibility and the authority to act.
-Crolis
Now even my browser is making strange claims. At the top of my screen it says:
Scientists Create New Form of Matter - Netscape 6
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Once again we get to address arguments.
Drugs -- Drugs have been a problem with humanity far before public education existed. I'm sure you're not positing that teenage drug use is a good reason to close down the public school system, thereby denying millions an education.
Alcohol -- They're not getting alcohol at school... well, not the smart ones anyhow. It's too bulky to easily smuggle into and out of a school. They're getting it from their friends after school. You don't think that without public schools people won't have friends do you?
Teen Pregnancy -- It's not a social atmosphere from school. Teen pregnancy is a perfectly natural part of human development. It wasn't until fairly recently that we started giving a shit about it. My grandmother was married at 14 and popping out munchkins at 17 (pesky WWII got in the way). Teen pregnancy has become a problem because of a changing social atmosphere outside schools.
Depression -- There we go. What an argument. Kids don't like being forced to learn so we shouldn't teach them. Wow... you're more libreal than I thought. Depression is teen angst. Most teenagers are "depressed" because it gets them attention. Depression is like being a fan of the Back Street Boys, something you grow out of. Admittedly, there are the very select few that actualy suffer from a disorder and need treatment... of course, most medical evidence suggests that as this is a neurochemical inbalance the absence or presence of education will not agrivate it.
Run-aways -- I'm not sure where you're sending your kids. Running away from home is the kind of thing you skip town for. You're generaly not going to school with people from out of town.
Suicide -- I think you'd be hard pressed to find a suicide note from a teenager lamenting the state of public education.
Killfile(TGK)
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