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Diamond Rain In Saturn
Taco Cowboy writes "Back in 1999, it was postulated that diamonds may rain from the sky in the atmospheres of our solar system's gas giants. Now, research has shown that diamond rains on Saturn are more than probable. '"We don't want to give people the impression that we have a Titanic-sized diamondberg floating around," said researcher Mona Delitsky, of California Specialty Engineering, "We're thinking they're more like something you can hold in your hand." Recent data compiled by planetary scientists ... has been combined with newly published pressure temperature diagrams of Jupiter and Saturn. These diagrams, known as adiabats, allow researchers to decipher at what interior level that diamond would become stable. They also allow for calculations at lower levels – regions where both temperature and pressure are so concentrated that diamond becomes a liquid. Imagine diamond rain or rivulets of pure gemstone.' 'At even greater depths, the scientists say the diamond will eventually melt to form liquid diamond, which may then form a stable ocean layer.'
And in other news, Israel has recently decided to develop a fully operational space program, with its first destinations to be Saturn and Jupiter.
Diamond, by definition, described one of the solid forms of pure carbon. Melt a diamond into a liquid, and by definition, you get liquid carbon.
The paper, written by idiots clearly, uses the term 'liquid diamond' NOT to refer to liquid diamond, but liquid carbon in a state that is on the verge of solidifying into solid diamond NOT solid graphite. Why oh why do we need to dumb things down in science? Everyone with even a minimum knowledge of physics and chemistry understands the concept of pressure/temperature phase changes as matter moves between (often ill-defined) states of gas, liquid and solid.
Under ordinary atmospheric pressure, water has THREE distinct freezing points, NOT one. Complexity in phase changes is commonplace. We do NOT have to use "Janet and John" like terms in order to make science 'accessible'. It is the truth of science that is beautiful, and if a truth involves significant complexity, we should embrace that.
A true liquid should always be defined by the lack of permanent molecular bonds, denying the ability of a true liquid to be crystalline. Complexity in science allows molecular constructs to be neither true solids or true liquids, and we should be grown up enough to accept this fact.
The very worst example of the real world consequences of this dumbing down was when NASA, via a project headed by a woman who had ONLY been employed for reasons of political correctness, declared that the woman's 'team' had discovered creatures on Earth whose DNA used non-standard atoms. As soon as the woman declared that the DNA was identical to ordinary DNA, save for the fact that one type of atom had been substituted by another, I and thousands of others with scientific understanding realised we were witnessing one of the greatest pieces of JUNK SCIENCE in Human History.
This brainless female had taken the simplified nonsense taught to 10-year-olds about the periodic table ("elements in the same column can replace one another in chemical reactions") and had applied that 'logic' to the most complex biological machine known to man. It is as if someone suggested you can repair a broken CPU in a PC with an ABACUS, because the abacus and CPU are both members of the class of things that calculate. NASA had recruited a woman THIS stupid, simply because she was female, and had forced a whole bunch of proper MALE scientists to work beneath her, in order to produce such humiliating pseudo science. Political correctness has no place in science, and neither does 'dumbing down'.