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A Quasi-Quasicrystal
An anonymous reader sends along a link to a mindbending article in Science News on quasicrystals — odd materials with a structure partway between order and disorder. Now researchers have found something even odder: a material that's partway between a quasicrystal and a regular crystal. The order in the new structure is provided by the Fibonacci sequence. It was constructed with plastic beads and laser beams, so no new materials science inventions are on the horizon. "'We are absolutely sure that this structure should have properties that are not usual,' Mikhael says, because materials with odd structures almost always do. Now they just have to figure out what those properties are."
"'We are absolutely sure that this structure should have properties that are not usual,' Mikhael says, because materials with odd structures almost always do."
Sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch.
Seriously, though, I'd rather hear about what interesting/new discoveries come out of this strange material than just hear about the possibility of its existence.
Catch telemarketers
Hey, it has worked before...
That was the first thing I thought of too.
quasiquasicrystals, then quasiquasicrystalcrystals, then quasicrystalcrystalquasicrystalquasis...
You're dealing with forces beyond your understanding....
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
Apparently... that would be ALL forces then ? :p
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
we used to just split hairs.
Now we split crystals. And get quasicrystals. Which were supposed to be unusual.
And now we have quasi-quasicrystals. And then they're "not usual."
And next we can get something somewhere between a quasicrystal and a quasiquasicrystal.
I'd rather hear about what interesting/new discoveries come out of this strange material than just hear about the possibility of its existence.
In 10 years' time you'll be hearing about the quasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasiquasicrystal, but we still won't know what the heck to do with them.
"We are absolutely sure that this structure should have properties that are not usual," Mikhael says, because materials with odd structures almost always do. Now they just have to figure out what those properties are.
Property #1: the ability to endow a grad student with his PhD and a sizable chunk of grant money.
I could be a random resistance element that could be used as a random number seed. Or it could be the mythical room temperature non-conductor.
Now they just have to figure out what those properties are.
1) Does it taste like chicken?
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
Which one is it? The summary needs to make up its mind. Either it is something that occurs naturally (and TFA seems to suggest otherwise) in which case it would be "found" or it is something cooked up in a lab which would make it "constructed".
I have isolated a compound in my lab. I call it the Politiquasicrystal. I have determined that it can bend the truth with no expenditure of energy.
Almost but not entirely unlike crystal?
Well, for those that didn't RTFA, I did for
you... and no... they didn't go to a piece
goods shop and buy a sack of necklace beads.
FTA:
To simplify matters, the team set out to create a quasicrystal from micron-sized plastic beads called colloidal particles.
For those unfamiliar with colloidals, it is
from the Greek work kolla, meaning glue as the
first colloids were just that. Particulate size
is such that surface area is greater than volume
thus the particulates tend not to settle from
gravity.
They're pretty useful in everyday life. Some
common items would be some aerosol sprays,
shotcrete for your pool out back and the yummy
emulsion, mayonnaise!
These in TFA however are just micron sized beads
of plastic.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
They don't exist anymore - they got bought out by Hawking's Bathrooms in 2004.
We'd like to study these crystals, but we require more vespene gas!
Because it's one of the several possible tiling, and it's not exclusive. In other words, there are other tilings that fit specific type of quasicrystals. There is no reason to pick Penrose's one. What has been found in TFA, is more general. In fact the tiling in this system is very different from any other, since it is somewhat an hybrid between a conventional quasicrystal and a crystal. Why are you all so obsessed with Penrose's tiling?
Uh, mi fyngers hyt the wrong kei whyle tipyng!
"That was non- non-non non-heinous!"
Thats almost but not entirely unlike a meme.
Every other reference to Wolfram on /. seems to be rather derogatory. He's seen as stealing others' ideas and shamelessly self-promoting. His "A New Kind of Science", at 1200 pages, was self-published and unedited. For these reasons and others, he doesn't seem to have the highest reputation, though despite it all I found ANKOS pretty amazing.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.