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Marble and Sand Creates a New State of Matter
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience has a story about a surprisingly simple experiment (yes, you can try this at home) at room temperature that yielded a jet of sand that behaves similar to jets created in ultra-dense gas near absolute zero. From the article: 'We're discovering a new type of fluid state that seems to exist in this combination of gas--air in this case--and a dense arrangement of particles.'"
I'll get it out of the way and declare this new state of matter Mand! Because Sarble would just be stupid sounding. Really.
Don't sweat the petty things. Don't pet the sweaty things. --Stephen J. Simmons
I like it when unexpected things happen and science can't explain it. Status quo is upset and knowledge gets a chance to reorder thinking. Now that bit in the experiment where the *jet* behaves in well defined boundaries informs us that there is more than meets the eye! This is the part of Science where it is challenged by its dictum of "observable" facts.
So how long is the Discipline going to be constrained by the human eye? How much experimental information is lost in the reduction to an observable medium?
It's not that the resulting wave acts in a novel manner, what is suprising is the column of matter that shoots up afterwards (the jet). Quick and Dirty Summary of the aricle: As you increase ambient pressure on a losely packed cluster of particles you would expect the pressure response from a force to be lessened, resulting in a smaller jet. Instead the high pressure in-between the particles seems to act as a turbocharger, creating a larger force - evidenced by the much higher jet.
But it certainly isn't new. I'm quite sure that I read about it at least a year ago. "New state of matter" is a bit of a stretch; it's more that "heavy particle gases" are enough unlike ideal gases that they do some relatively interesting things. As I understand it, the point of studying them is to gain a better understanding of more mundane gases in interesting situations like turbulent flow.
Also, I seem to remember that some years back there was an experiment done on the space shuttle involving a mess of ball bearings in microgravity that was also intended to study the same thing.