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Scientists Finally Turn Hydrogen Into a Metal, Ending a 80-Year Quest (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 1935, scientists predicted that the simplest element, hydrogen, could also become metallic under pressure, and they calculated that it would take 25 GigaPascals to force this transition (each Gigapascal is about 10,000 atmospheres of pressure). That estimate, in the words of the people who have finally made metallic hydrogen, "was way off." It took until last year for us to reach pressures where the normal form of hydrogen started breaking down into individual atoms -- at 380 GigaPascals. Now, a pair of Harvard researchers has upped the pressure quite a bit more, and they have finally made hydrogen into a metal. All of these high-pressure studies rely on what are called diamond anvils. This hardware places small samples between two diamonds, which are hard enough to stand up to extreme pressure. As the diamonds are forced together, the pressure keeps going up. Current calculations suggested that metallic hydrogen might require just a slight boost in pressure from the earlier work, at pressures as low as 400 GigaPascals. But the researchers behind the new work, Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, discovered it needed quite a bit more than that. In making that discovery, they also came to a separate realization: normal diamonds weren't up to the task. "Diamond failure," they note, "is the principal limitation for achieving the required pressures to observe SMH," where SMH means "solid metallic hydrogen" rather than "shaking my head." The team came up with some ideas about what might be causing the diamonds to fail and corrected them. One possibility was surface defects, so they etched all diamonds down by five microns to eliminate these. Another problem may be that hydrogen under pressure could be forced into the diamond itself, weakening it. So they cooled the hydrogen to slow diffusion and added material to the anvil that absorbed free hydrogen. Shining lasers through the diamond seemed to trigger failures, so they switched to other sources of light to probe the sample. After loading the sample and cranking up the pressure (literally -- they turned a handcrank), they witnessed hydrogen's breakdown at high pressure, which converted it from a clear sample to a black substance, as had been described previously. But then, somewhere between 465 and 495 GigaPascals, the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals The study has been published in the journal Science.
Use it to power our cellphones?
Who's hull is described as "an element not found on earth"
// elements are elements
/// except maybe that "island of stability"
/ particular pet peeve of mine
Fundamental research is never fruitless.
Done 20 years ago in a gas gun:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/26/science/big-gun-makes-hydrogen-into-a-metal.html
Room temperature superconductors could cause a jump of orders of magnitude in capability across a wide range of technologies.
From the article,
Metallic hydrogen may be a room temperature superconductor and metastable when the pressure is released and could have an important impact on energy and rocketry.
Here's Wikipedia's take on the issue:
Basic research generates new ideas, principles, and theories, which may not be immediately utilized but nonetheless form the basis of progress and development in different fields. Today's computers, for example, could not exist without research in pure mathematics conducted over a century ago, for which there was no known practical application at the time. Basic research rarely helps practitioners directly with their everyday concerns; nevertheless, it stimulates new ways of thinking that have the potential to revolutionize and dramatically improve how practitioners deal with a problem in the future.[5]
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
More stories like this one please!
This. Fundamental research is never fruitless. Who knows what may come out of this?
Any estimate as to the density of this solid metal hydrogen?
Might this be what the core of super-dense celestial bodies consist of?
Fucking bad ass. This just strikes me as awesome. It's theoretical science made real. It's like a scientific profession of faith in reason made physical.
Questions abound!
Would the metal transition back to gas at one atmosphere? Would low temperatures retard the transition? Does it act as a superconductor? Is there any speculation on why the diamond destabilizes at a greater frequency under laser illumination? What likely metallurgical properties is it likely to exhibit? Is it likely we'll be able to take advantage of any of them at room temp / one atmosphere ?
The solar core is 26.5 Petapascals. Something makes me think that metallic hydrogen may be a requirement for a stable fusion reaction that doesn't require artificial confinement.
This story isn't as awesome as the recent one about the man-pig monsters that mad scientists can now create, but it is still right up there in the awesome category.
Shaking my head? I always thought it meant so much hate.
So, we could pump 3.8 billion mega-watts through a wire no thicker than a human hair.
All known and predicted superconductors have a magnetic field limit where superconductivity breaks down. The higher the current density in a wire, the higher the magnetic field strength, so hence there is a limit to how much current you can put through a superconductor of a given size, and it is low enough to mean you need decent sized wires still. The exact limit depends on the material and the temperature, and so you see high temperature superconductors that work at liquid nitrogen temperatures used with the more expensive liquid helium so more current can be crammed through them.
, but the way superconductors work is by essentially pushing the electron next to them to the side.
All conductors work this way. The actual drift speed of electrons in even a copper wire is quite small.
you could effectively have faster-than-light communication
Nope, the electrons push on each other using the electromagnetic force, which moves at the speed of light or slower. The electrons at the end of the wire don't push on the other end instantly, and the force gets communicated down the wire at a speed slower than c.
And that people is why reading the summary tells you more than just reading the headline. The summary tells you how they made it into a metal.
What's with the unnecessary capitalization?
When Atouk first invented the wheel and axle, he cast it aside as worthless, because he could not, at that time, see the practical value. Documentary here.
> Fundamental research is never fruitless. Who knows what may come out of this?
Exactly.
Perhaps it will be the basis for that elusive "Better Mousetrap".
"If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door." - anonymous, or at least variously attributed
Gah! If that's really the main thing that drives the economy we will soon be completely and utterly fucked.
Sometimes you really wish you had mod points so you could do something more useful than post how sad it is that a scientifically inaccurate post is getting modded up while a scientifically accurate corrective reply isn't.
For me, this is one of those times.
WTF? Perhaps those scientists were unaware that hydrogen has always been classified as a metal on the periodic table.
People have speculated about that, but "now used"? Can you give a single example of a satellite launched that way?
I can think of dozens of real uses for lasers from supermarket scanners up without having to pretend a near-future SF thing has already happened.
I'm just gonna call bullshit on this assertion. Taking Wikipedia as a source (yes, I know its failings, but it's good enough for a back-of-the-envelope figure), we have around 6.5% losses in electricity transmission. Which means that the best case scenario in replacing standard conductors with superconductors is a reduction of around 6.5% in electricity generation needs.
As for the idea of faster-than-light communication, that's pure science fantasy. Faster-than-light communication basically is functionally identical to sending information back in time (the explanation is complicated, but feel free to read the Wikipedia article for details.) It violates every single known law of physics. If it were found to be possible, it would mean completely rewriting the physics textbooks - it'd be a complete shakeup of laws considered to be foundational in nature.
In short: you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
Current scientific theory makes a testable prediction. So we tested it, and verified the theory held up. How is that ever a waste of time?
80 years seems like a long time searching for something
The prediction was made 80 years ago. It was tested recently.
Its not like a whole bunch of people spent every waking minute the last 80 years working a bicycle pump to get up to 10,000 atomospheres of pressure.
Why don't these articles have pictures!! I want to SEE the metal!!! Don't these people have smartphones? Why aren't they taking selfies and posting them in the papers? Please, could someone kindly link some pictures? Thank you.
whoosh
Also from the article was that it was observed to still have the properties they associated with being metallic at 83K.
83 degrees kelvin is a heck of a long way from room temperature.
Hence my inquiry about the practical benefits of this.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Eliminating the loss from electric transmission would give a savings of about 80% of our electricity output.
Sorry, but this is way, way off. Transmission losses vary from 2-10%, with the upper limit there being very long distance transmission lines or overloaded old lines. This also includes loses due to transformers, where often the dominate loss is not the resistance of the copper, but the magnetic properties of the core (e.g. magnetorestriction which is what causes them to hum).
Continental sized grids would benefit from lower transmission losses, and being able to build large power sources far away from it is needed will be far, far more important than the transmission loss saving that would just slow down the construction of new plants rather than shut down old ones.
In high school, I asked my grade 13 chemistry teacher why Hydrogen was on the left column of the periodic table where everything else was a metal. I was told because it had one electron in the outer shell, like everything else in that column.
The conversation went something like "But, if everything else in the column is a metal, doesn't that imply Hydrogen is a metal?" "No, it's a gas." "But hydrogen can be cooled to a liquid and it behaves like other liquefied metals (ie Mercury), couldn't it be cooled to the point where it is solid and will it behave like a metal?" "Go away."
In university, I asked the same question and was told that my reasoning was not unique and the idea was put forward many years before but that we'll probably never produce the necessary conditions on earth where Hydrogen will be a solid and we can see if it will be a metal.
Nice to see that we've done something that was thought to be, if not impossible, extremely difficult.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
If nothing else, this research has resulted in the technology for compressing something at incredible pressures, never before thought possible.
I'm sure it's suitable for compressing The Flash's costume to the point where it could be hidden in a ring!
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I don't like to pick on a person for being naive and getting things wrong... but when a whole group agree with it, it gets sad.
I count eleven full sentences, and only three of them are not completely wrong: some theorize metallic hydrogen is a superconductor, superconductors could allow for more distant power plants, and basic research can lead to unexpected things. The other eight are just horribly wrong, some in more than one way, making for a rather terrible number of errors in a short space.
I'm sure that Finnish guy (and his giggling wife) can try an episode with hydrogen.
https://youtu.be/69fr5bNiEfc
I know slashdot is not what it used to be, and you have a relatively low user id, but why are you here? Seriously.
The solar core is also very, very hot.
Fusion reaction rates have been well studied in the lab, to the point that predictions were made about exactly what fraction of different reaction paths would happen in the Sun. These predictions were later confirmed when neutrino detectors were built that could resolve the energy spectrum of solar neutrinos.
Fusion in the Sun is horribly slow compared to what is needed for a power plant. The heat produced is on the order of a couple hundred watts per cubic meter. Liter for liter, a human's metabolism produces more heat per volume. The Sun is just really, really big, and all of that volume adds up, not just in terms of heat created, but in terms of insulation and gravitational forces. Power plants can't get away with that slow of a reaction rate considering the amount of energy it takes to cram things together without gravity's help. Hence why many fusion research machines have long since passed the temperature at the center of the sun and actually need about ten times the temperature to be useful.
Welcome to the Hoodralic Press Channel. Today we are going to be crushings some Hy-drogen. And here we go!
To apply the rule of three:
1: Because the quest for understanding the universe is never a waste: it's a deep and primal human drive/need.
2: Because, surprisingly often, that quest results in unexpected paybacks: for example, I'm sure Einstein never thought general relativity was anything more than a beautiful and accurate explanation of how gravity works, and yet without it GPS would not be an accurate thing. Ditto the early pioneers of quantum mechanics.
3: But, again, mostly because the drive to understand our world is what makes us human. You could equally well question why Hillary (Edmund, that is) bothered climbing Everest, why we went to the moon, why we yearn to travel, or why every year we strive so hard to sell ourselves more stuff to jam into our already over-stuffed houses (actually scratch that last one: that baffles me too).
I am a condensed matter physicist.
There are no practical applications of metallic hydrogen in the foreseeable future. There is an "always be selling" philosophy in science for the last few decades which is really unfortunate and has not been healthy for public trust of science. Many people have been sold on applications for metallic hydrogen that are not realistic.
Was this a waste of time? No. The fundamental theories of how metals are structured and how conductivity works say that hydrogen should be a great metal. The historic difficulty in creating metallic hydrogen may have meant that we were missing something important about how metals form, or missing something important about hydrogen (we discovered we were missing a lot of the necessary physics over the course of 80 years). The observation of metallic hydrogen now is an important verification of the level of completeness of our understanding of matter.
Spending 80 years to work something out is not so unusual in physics. Difficult projects take a few generations.
Yes, these were some of the thoughts that immediately crossed my mind and when I heard that it might be metastable (when you relieve the pressure it might stay in that form).
I was wondering what the energy released would be if one could trigger the change back from the meta-stable state back to the normal (lowest energy?) ground state. It might not be a lot (like if you convert diamonds into graphite) but maybe not. I remember hearing of a science fiction story in which a "molecular distortion" battery could store and release fully 10 percent of its rest mass as energy. Of course this would only be for energy storage, not production so there would be no net gain (and maybe big losses). Still it would be a great boon for portable sources of energy for transportation (or explosives!).
Likewise, having just a metallic (powdered?) form of hydrogen could do wonders for space travel. Not having to cryogenically store liquid hydrogen at a few degrees above absolute zero would be great. Even if the solid had to kept below 83K that's still a big improvement. And if the density was (much) higher then there would be big structural savings on having smaller propellant tanks.
I wonder if metastable metallic hydrogen would have any impact on nuclear fusion. IF (and it's a big IF) they can produce small "pellets" of this for use in the inertial confinement (laser) fusion reactor, I'm hoping they can try it with other isotopes (I assume they used straight up single proton hydrogen). Deuterium or tritium might have more "explosive" results!
Had to do it. Sorry. ðY
The Hindenburg disaster happened on May 6, 1937, almost exactly 80 years go. Have you seen the pictures? If you saw it going down in flames, you can't tell me that it wouldn't be the most metal thing you've ever seen. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
... and that, as we all know... is transparent aluminum.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The post was just being silly, an obvious joke. It's kind of weird that people are taking it seriously.
Serious question.... are any practical implications to this at all?
Of what practical use is a newborn baby?
80 years seems like a long time searching for something
80 years elapsed between the prediction and the result. That doesn't mean that some 30 year old researcher spent the last 80 years devoting his life to the quest, only to emerge from his lab as a triumphant 110 year old geezer, who shouts "eureka" and then falls down dead. For much of the 80 years, nobody was actively working on it. The diamond anvil cell was only invented in 1959.
Actually there may be. Look at the Polywell or the Fusion reactor that Lockheed Martin has proposed. In both, the math works, they are just fairly complex (which means failure cases abound) and expensive (again, complex to build, operate, etc).
Room Temperature superconductivity would be a great benefit to both being able to be mass produced. Assuming this process can be repeated AND it will stay in its metallic form rather than phasing back to gas, then there could be instant applications if it can be mass produced and spooled in to coils.
Yes. I was specifically thinking of the Alan Parsons Project.
Forget suits. Entire vehicles and cabins in small packages.
with the original estimation?
What can explain the 80x miss?
What about it being hydrogen means that it does have to stay at that pressure?
It can't be too obvious, considering how many informative/interesting mods it got instead of funny mods. As said above, the sad part is that so many people agree with it, regardless of the reason the original post was made.
Failing to to take a step back and identify why something is difficult and then figuring out to eliminate that difficulty happens a lot as far as I can tell.Hopefully, things will not stay "not that unusual".
A baby provides to benefit to anyone. It just uses resources and never supplies any of it's own. Of what use is it?
You don't know for sure until you've had time to think about it, and play around with it. You know, give the discovery some time to grow up. If you want instant products popping out, you really need to reexamine your view of reality. It's called research. They don't know what they'll find, or what use it will be. Do you really think the early experimenters with pretty much anything, including radio, electricity, magnetism, and so many other things knew what would come out of it?
Of course they didn't, but they still experimented and we are all better for it.
Here's a couple of Scientific Urban Legends (unproven quotes attributed to figures of science) for you to read as they are far more eloquent than I.
Benjamin Franklin observes the first balloon ascension in 1783 while he was Ambassador at the Court of France. Someone asks "What possible use are balloons?" Franklin answers "What use is a newborn baby?"
Michael Faraday is visited by a delegation of government dignitaries. They are shown his electric motors and other demos. One person says "This is all very interesting, but of what possible use are these toys?" Faraday responds: "I cannot say what use they may be, but I can confidently predict that one day you will be able to tax them."
Actually it does become metallic.
Metals aren't what you think they are, but that's ok, there are lots of books and articles on that you can go read.
Also, and atomic transmutation would take a heck of a lot more than simple pressures a basic diamond anvil can ever produce. You do realize that would require the merging of the atomic nuclei to make a heavier nucleus, don't you? And it wouldn't go straight to lithium either, it would go to helium first. After all, it seems pretty unlikely we'd be bypassing the steps even the sun has to take.
Extreme bling just got a lot lighter!!!!
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
How is faster than light communication functionally identical to sending information backwards in time?
As far as I can see, if a hypothetical signal travelling at twice the speed of light were sent from a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, then it still reaches us over 2 years *after* the signal was sent. If we send a response at the same speed, it will take another 2+ years to get there... at about the same time our ordinary telescopes pick up any additional evidence of their having sent the original signal. But they still don't receive any response for over 4 years *after* they sent the original message. There's no sending information backwards in time here that I can see here.
I'm not suggesting that sending information at such speeds may necessarily ever be possible (I suspect it isn't for what it's worth), I am only saying that I can see no reason to equate it to somehow sending information backwards in time.
My understanding of sending a signal backwards in time would be when you get a response to a signal that you hadn't even sent yet, but that doesn't happen here... can you give an example of how it faster than light communication could enable that? If not, then why are they assumed to be functionally identical?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When I first saw your comment I thought you were making a joke. Then I realized there are people on this site who don't know what a metal is, and someone dumb enough to not know that might interpret the headline the way you did. Then I had a good laugh.
"Thank you for being my personal clown" -lots of people
don't the solar core pressure estimates assume a non-metal core? They looks like gas pressure equations to me... Obviously there's the temperature dimension still to explore - star cores are likely much warmer than 83 Kelvin.
"Never"? That's a bold claim and not necessary to answer the parent. A positive probability of eventual practical implications should be sufficient.
Personally I think it's even fine to do activities that have 0% probability of practical implications. If the ultimate goal is the maximize global happiness, then research like this makes curious people excited, which contributes to happiness.
For any signal going faster than c, there is some reference frame where the signal leaves after it arrives. While your signal from Earth to Alpha Centauri would be seen as leaving before arriving by Earth, that is not true for travelers travelling between them at significant but sublight speeds. You can exploit this with multiple communication channels by something called a Roman ring (usually applied to wormholes, but works for FTL transmitters too with some more setup/moving parts), and get a signal that does get back to Earth before it left.
This is heavily written about everywhere from superficial popsci articles to Wikipedia to in depth class notes, so there is no need to wait for or trust answers from a Slashdot poster.
http://www.nature.com/news/phy...
I think you responded to the literal interpretation of GP's argument, without addressing the more reasonable interpretation, that is, are there better things to be researching?
Throughout history, many breakthroughs happened independently and simultaneously. I think given the right circumstances, the same discovery can be made by many people. In fact, many discoveries are trivial given the right infrastructure.
Hindsight is obviously 20/20, but I can say that just about everyone staring at the cosmos before the invention of the telescope was wasting their time. If they had instead spent their time researching how to turn sand into glass, we probably would've gotten a much better understanding of astronomy much sooner.
In the story for example, it could be that simply by waiting 5 years, we'd have much better diamond anvils, and it would be trivial to recreate those pressures. Or maybe camera technology would improve so much that you can use shaped charges instead and just capture its sub-millisecond existence. You never know.
"the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals"
Water is reflective. Hot air on the pavement is reflective at shallow angles. Neither of these are metals.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
There is a possibility that we may discover new forms (phases) of matter. For example study of Bose-Einstein condensate ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) has revealed a lot of new physics. Study of once similarly obscure Superconductivity has given rise to a lot of new physics. Imagine if Hydrogen metallization experiment would lead to a new method to cause nuclear fusion. It may also help to answer the fundamental question: What is matter? and Why does it exist?
In the case of FTL communication, the name Tachyonic antitelephone is traditional and much more common than Roman ring. The linked wikipedia article has an explicit example with numbers showing the problem.
You have to admit, it's pretty rare that the summary provides more information than the article. /. after all.
This is
The sun is not stable. Coronal ejections can span multiple AU from its surface.
... this endeavor was not simply a colossal waste of time?
Here's one interesting way to think about it. As per the article, scientists had used observations and measurements to predict that metallic hydrogen would require either 25GPa or (later) 380 - 400GPa of pressure. We now know that the known lower bound is somewhere around 465GPa. With this result, we can refine the models used in the original predictions and find out where they failed, and correct them.
With such corrections in hand, we may be able to make other predictions about hydrogen (or perhaps about other elements) with much more accuracy; and you just can't ever know where that might lead. It could lead to new battery technologies. It could lead to a better understanding of star formation. Maybe it revolutionizes material science.
That's the great thing about discovery -- it's often incremental, and you never know where a result might take you. At the very least, we can correct the models that once caused scientists to predict that 25GPa of pressure would turn hydrogen into a metal; where that can take us is an exciting unknown. Sometimes it's less about actually creating metallic hydrogen as much as it is what you learned along the way that becomes useful later.
(I'd think at the very least what has been learned about preventing diamond fragility at high pressures counts as a potentially immediately useful result -- although again, how someone might be able to use this in the future is an exciting question)
Yaz
Freezing hydrogen may make it solid, but certainly not a metalFreezing hydrogen may make it solid, but certainly not a metal.
Why not? Metal is not a binary state of being where either you are or you are not. It sounds awfully exotic, but it is actually more common than most people realise. Take for example tin.
Tin as you know it is a metal. Shiny, conductive of heat and electricity, alloys with other metals freely, etc. That is in fact beta tin. Tin has another form, alpha tin, which is dull and insulating and decidedly nonmetallic. This form is the most stable below about 13 degrees C in pure tin. What's more, it's autocatalytic and will cause beta tin to transform to alpha tin. It also takes up more space, so the transformation is destructive and known as "tin pest". It has destroyed numerous things over the course of history.
If you like (I recommend it), you can watch time lapse videos on youtube where a solid block of metal tin turns to grey powder over the course of hours when cooled to a quite low temperature.
If you go look at the periodic table, there's a diagonal line which separates non metals from metals. Everything near the line does not behave entirely in ways that one might consider a metal to behave. Aluminium for example, is not quite such a metallic metal as you might think. It's pretty metallic, but in some ways behaves in distinctly nonmetallic ways. Tin is near the line. Hydrogen is on it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
we have EM drive though, which doesn't require solid fuel at all and is only limited by field strength
"Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it." (M. Faraday)
Sounds like an arfiment for socialism. Given enough time, a million monkeys with a million typewriters will produce the greatest novel of all time.
argument*
I, for one, wanted to see pictures (why does no one ever think of the pictures??!). There are some here: https://www.thenews.com.pk/lat...
Well, hindsight and all that. If we knew what would happen in advance why would we even need to do research? In this story it seems that the improvement n diamond anvils came about because of this research, so waiting 5 years and not doing the research would result in you having exactly the same diamond anvils as you started with.
"Many discoveries are trivial given the right infrastructure" may be true, but that just means that research is essentially about developing the infrastructure needed to answer a question, with the constraint that you don't know in advance exactly what infrastructure you'll need.
Thanks to this research, we have better diamond anvils now and not after waiting for 5 years, so there's at least that.
Also, I bet that many people would have called playing with sand and fire pointless - what possibly could be the benefit of melting sand, there are more important things to do, like staring at the cosmos. And then some shiny things were created, perhaps the first reactions of some people was something like "Well great, we all like shiny things, but so what. We need food, why don't you focus on that?" Coincidentally, the result of this study was some shiny thing, which doesn't have practical uses at the moment.
A big part of the fundamental research is to look where other paths don't take and expect for the unexpected.
A spokesman for hydrogen said earlier - "There. HAPPY NOW?"
In the same way that Charlie Daniels went from "Uneasy Rider" and playing bass for Bob Dylan to writing songs about hanging drug dealers. Some people just turn old and mean, I guess.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ah - so the joke is someone acting like some of the other people on this site, such as the high frequency trading and orbital beanstalk freaks, and I'm supposed to tell the difference in some way?
Subtle.
Can you explain to me why your post wast not a colossal waste of time? Wait, no, that's not right, it was only a modest waste of time, but a waste of time nonetheless.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
An 80 year quest? Hope the scientists gained a few levels for that one.
American cretins...
You can say pretty much whatever you want but that doesn't mean whatever you say is insightful or true. Your star gazing example is a particularly good demonstration of that. Firstly because I'm confident a lot of benefit came from 'staring at the cosmos' before telescopes, and that same logic you use would invariably mean that most of the time spent trying to create 'glass' was wasted because it would have been easier/quicker to wait until other discoveries had already been made.
When you're talking about basic research it often isn't remotely clear when you start what obstacles you might hit or what other research may or may not deal with those obstacles if you waited. Even if it was viable for individual researches or establishments to have incredible foresight about how all research may overlap and interact it wouldn't necessarily make sense to have a researcher in one area twiddle their thumbs for a couple of years while they wait for an expected discovery/invention to come from researchers in a different field; researchers can't just magically change their specialisation and knowledge to work on something completely different so better things to be researching has to be applied within their field to be relevant. If you mean over a wider field then you're talking about 5-10 year timelines to either educate new researchers in that different area or allow researchers to change their specialisation (which many won't want to do).
If we're lucky, we might see something like that after another 80 years.
This. Fundamental research is never fruitless.
History has shown that warmongering is endless.
Who knows what may come out of this?
Likely the same shit was said during the inception of the Manhattan Project.
> Fundamental research is never fruitless. Who knows what may come out of this?
Exactly.
Perhaps it will be the basis for that elusive "Better Mousetrap".
"If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door." - anonymous, or at least variously attributed
Splitting the fucking atom certainly led to a better "mousetrap", now didn't it?
Sometimes the drive to make something better ends up feeding the evils of warmongering. Given what we know of man, we should always be wise to acknowledge both sides of the coin.
Actually, it's often fruitless. But you don't know ahead of time which of it will become fruitful.
It's like what the apocryphal CEO said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" - and continued spending all that money on advertising.
Clearly you've never watched The Mist.
This. Fundamental research is never fruitless. Who knows what may come out of this?
We've learned that forming metallic Hydrogen takes conditions that make it likely impractical for any beneficial use. A tasty fruit indeed.
Ehh, no. You are talking about the definition of "metal" in chemistry, which is a category of elements. The "transparent Aluminum" (or Aluminium if you prefer) as established in Star Trek, is not some sort of exotic state of the elemental Al, but a compound that can be created (using technology that is not futuristic). In fact, "transparent aluminum" doesn't even fit the alternate, more "loose", non-chemistry definition of "metal", as it is neither opaque, nor shiny. So, we are simply looking for a very strong transparent compound based on Aluminum. Sapphire and ruby might fit the bill if they can be made clear, but, as I learned from another post, there is something called Aluminium oxynitride and marketed as ALON, which makes pretty good transparent armor and generally seems to fit the description very well.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
This is good for interstellar travel, and somewhat for within the solar system, but it still takes a lot of time to build speed. It also takes a lot to get out of a planets gravity well. For this, chemical rockets are still the best we have, and likely will be for some time. If this could even slightly increase fuel density, then it is potentially great.
Silence is a state of mime.
That is the best thing ever happened to me. Love you, Ars Technica.
Metallic hydrogen is been theorized to be a room temperature superconductor. It's yet to see if we'll ever have a practical application for it, given how hard it is to make it happen in the first place, but interesting nevertheless.
See :
https://www.scientificamerican...
Quote :
Five experts told Natureâ(TM)s news team that they do not yet believe the claim, and need more evidence. âoeI donâ(TM)t think the paper is convincing at all,â says Paul Loubeyre, a physicist at Franceâ(TM)s Atomic Energy Commission in BruyÃres-le-ChÃtel.
Video/Pic's, or it didn't happen.
This. Fundamental research is never fruitless. Who knows what may come out of this?
We've learned that forming metallic Hydrogen takes conditions that make it likely impractical for any beneficial use. A tasty fruit indeed.
Not much of a scientise, he?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Man do I ever have terrible news for you about the discovery of Fire and the Wedge then.
While I view the EM drive as good
Out of interest do you view perpetual motion machines as good?
I ask, because if the EM drive works as described, then it goes over unity and so one can devise perpetual motion machines based on it. In otherwords, the existence of a working EM drive implies the existence of perpetual motion machines. Perpetual motion machines are impossible, therefore the EM drive is.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Would anyone familiar with the reported conditions/requirements be kind enough to translate this into likely/theoretical points of existence given our understanding of the wider universe?
For example, we've long speculated that the heat and mass of Jupiter might be such that hydrogen in the gas giant's atmosphere might be "condensed out" in liquid form, although if I understand correctly there will be other factors [such as gas densities and the prevalence of free hydrogen at the depths necessary for it to be transformed] remain speculation at this point...
However, what about other locations? Does our understanding of stars [containing lots of hydrogen] suggest that they might contain it. For example, could it exist at a boundary layer between the outer portion of the star and denser core materials? Given it's prevalence in the universe and the gravitational force of black holes, could it exist somewhere around the event horizon?
Just curious really.
Also, the difference between projected and discovered conditions required for formation seem quite significant. Wondering if that is an indication that our understanding of the physics is still a little way off?
But if I understand correctly the summary, the investigators worked in improving the quality of the anvils in order to achieve
the desired outcome.
Hindsight is obviously 20/20, but I can say that just about everyone staring at the cosmos before the invention of the telescope was wasting their time.
Apparently your hindsight is legally blind. Celestial nagivation predates the telescope by over 2,000 years and had a huge impact on human civilization.
Until recently, we were 100% sure the EM drive was impossible.
That's why this is so cool. If there IS something here - and we need more testing - then there are a lot of things we have to rethink. If it turns out to be true, and we aren't just missing something else going on, we will have to rewrite some chapters in our textbooks.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Cool, now we're one step closer to making Hellbores.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
You missed it. We were completely and utterly fucked on Nov 8th.
I'm more interested in at which pressure fusion would be achieved.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Pretty much by definition anything at giga, tera or petapascals is going to be hot.
But it is 6 degrees above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. Cooling things only that far is a lot cheaper than going down to liquid helium temps.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
Which might be nice if it were at pressures that were a little more normal on earth, but the article did not give that impression. While the article mentions there is a theoretical basis for believing that it would remain metal at more normal temperatures and pressures, the fact that it did not explicitly mention anything about being the same at a lower pressure when it mentioned maintaining its state at 83K suggests that the enormous pressures were maintained.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Recommendation well received.
The prediction was made 80 years ago. It was tested recently.
Its not like a whole bunch of people spent every waking minute the last 80 years working a bicycle pump to get up to 10,000 atomospheres of pressure.
4,650,000 to 4,950,000 atmospheres of pressure. 1 GPa is about 10,000 atmospheres and it took 465-495 GPa to achieve the outcome.
I think the real story is, we now know how to get diamond anvils to hold together under significantly higher pressures than were possible previously. How many other experiments does that open up?
The paper (preprint in arxiv ) is regarded with serious doubts by many physicists.
Yes, generating over 1kW of power with less than 2 micro newtons of force is totally a thing so we can make an EM drive power itself. Free energy for everyone!
Well, to directly rebut your example, the astronomical observations which Kepler used to derive his laws of planetary motion (orbits are ellipses with the sun at a focus, etc.), certainly one of the the most insightful discoveries in astronomy, were done by Tycho Brahe who did not use a telescope.
And the fact that this has been theorized, but that the only thing the article mentions about is is that held its state at 83K suggests that the theory it would stay that way at room temperature was bunk.
Not to mention the pressure that may be required to maintain.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There are a number of issues with this paper: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/pa... . The first is that the achieved pressure beyond 335 GPa are seat-of-the-pants estimates. The second is that they did not publish the mass of the "grain of ruby" and they did not account for what happened to this grain of ruby during the experiment. A one-atom layer of Al and Cr from the Al2:O3:Cr Ruby on the outside of their compressed 30 micron in diameter mass could account for their physical observations. My largest issue with the paper is they did not describe the depressurizing process. Metastability is a key indicator of metallic hydrogen and yet the paper omits any good or bad observations related to metastability. What happened at the end of the experiment? Why wasn't this reported?
I love the arrogance of assuming that the first law of thermodynamics doesn't count because you personally can't think of a practical perpetual motion machine based around the EM drive.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I guess. I remember the delight of discovering slashdot early on. Not quite as early as you, but my id was in the low five digits so not too much later. No doubt my memory is selective and it wasn't actually quite as good as I remember it to be, but when I wander back to slashdot now I'm so often discouraged.
as in "why am I here" reflective?
Actually there may be. Look at the Polywell or the Fusion reactor that Lockheed Martin has proposed. In both, the math works, they are just fairly complex (which means failure cases abound) and expensive (again, complex to build, operate, etc).
Actually, that's absolute rubbish. The math is what people dispute when it comes to the Polywell (their wiffleball concept had to be proved empirically), and conducting simulations is currently intractable even on a supercomputer. The device itself is incredibly simple and a full size model would be very cheap to build. I can't speak about Skunkwork's device because they've hardly released anything concrete about it, so you shouldn't have much to say about it either.
If they had instead spent their time researching how to turn sand into glass, we probably would've gotten a much better understanding of astronomy much sooner.
You will notice - I did note (via Helium) in the part about my comment on transmutation
maybe impractical for large quantities, but there's a lot of things that are very useful in tiny amounts, and if it's useful enough, it'll get made and used.
The article says they literally hand-cranked up the pressure to achieve this result.
Wouldn't you like to be that guy? "_ I _ was the guy whose hand physically created metallic hydrogen for the first time on planet earth".
That's pretty darn cool, if you ask me.
"I remember hearing of a science fiction story in which a "molecular distortion" battery could store and release fully 10 percent of its rest mass as energy."
You know some idiot would try to break the thing open with a crowbar and wipe out half a continent.
That sentence does not change the fact that you implied that being able to navigate across large bodies was a waste of time.
There are only three possibilities I can see for the EM drive:
1. It's a repeated experimental error, and further testing will eventually prove this. Most probable, but still exciting.
2. It works, but it isn't reactionless - it's just a hidden momentum dump. Perhaps it spits neutrinos out the back, or is interacting with WIMP particles. Our understanding of the laws of physics is wrong, but only a little wrong - science, as it always does, will need revising to explain new observations. It may or may not be useful for space travel when refined. It is possible that understanding the underlying physics will make it possible to design higher-thrust drives, but perpetual-motion-wise it is no more perpetual than a photon rocket.
3. Least likely, it is a true reactionless drive, and our understanding of the laws of physics is very wrong indeed. It may have been designed by a crank, but by sheer luck he stumbled upon a real and revolutionary effect that changes the way energy is understood.
Actually, it's often fruitless. But you don't know ahead of time which of it will become fruitful. It's like what the apocryphal CEO said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" - and continued spending all that money on advertising.
Bad example, because before you usually put ads in TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and billboards, the customer showed up in one of your stores and paid in cash, the challenge was finding what cause lead to the desired effect. The Internet made the marketing industry click crazy and fortunately they're less in your face today but you still have tracking through referrals, shopping accounts, ad trackers, bonus cards and loyalty programs everywhere. Sure there's plenty room for used car salesmen and voodoo priests but marketing is much more empirical than in the past.
Basic research I feel is more like a tech tree where you can't "look ahead", this is not Civilization where if I discover atomic theory I know I can build nukes* and lasers afterwards. You don't know what new research opportunities will come and you don't know what applications it'll have, so how could you possibly know the effect? You have to discover that it exists and how it works first, then see if you can find an application for it. And even if you don't, the more you know about how the world works the easier it's to find new things to test rather than pile assumptions on top of assumptions.
* after the Manhattan project, if you wanted to nitpick.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Other physicists have expressed skepticism over the Harvard group's claims of making metallic hydrogen. Importantly, the claim is made on the basis of one single experiment that has not yet been replicated by the group reporting the claims. From a news article published in Nature :
Other researchers aren't convinced. It’s far from clear that the shiny material the researchers see is actually hydrogen, says geophysicist Alexander Goncharov of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC. Goncharov has criticized the Silvera lab’s methods before. He suggests that the shiny material may be alumina (aluminium oxide), which coats the tips of the diamonds in the anvil, and may behave differently under pressure.
Loubeyre and others think that Silvera and Dias are overestimating the pressure that they reached, by relying on an imprecise calibration between turns of the screw and pressure inside the anvil. Eugene Gregoryanz, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, adds that part of the problem is that the researchers took only a single detailed measurement of their sample at the highest pressure — making it hard to see how pressure shifted during the experiment.
replace socialism with Darwinism as well since we are making corrections.
You're right of course. But like the guy I first replied to, you responded to the literal interpretation of the argument rather than the more reasonable interpretation, and a small piece of it at that. I was specifically speaking in the context of astronomy, about the people who looked at the stars and tried to understand and interpret them.
You also did not make any arguments against the idea that there may be something else more worthy of research effort. Given the countless possibilities for research directions, I think it's arrogant to think we've picked the best ones.
They should have just used a car of diamonds and a wall made out of diamonds and smashed them together in a chamber of hydrogen.
The debate is more of a chicken-egg problem. Computers would certainly come about and then drive the mathematics. Actually, it's more common for experiments to drive theory. Superconductors, superfluids, semiconductors, etc. all existed before theory could account for their behavior. Even the phosphorus doping of semiconductors was "discovered" by a machinist who noticed the faint smell of the ones that worked (phosphorus lamps had a similar odor). It's actually harder to think of fundamental technologies that were imagined using theory - lasers are the only thing that come to mind immediately.
Now of course modern integrated circuits would never really be possible without theory, nor would state of the art superconducting cables. But, theory is almost always driven by experiments, not the other way around. Quantum theory needed black body / photoelectric experiments, relativity needed Michelson–Morley. In my opinion the modern stagnation in new theories failing to dig deeper into reality is due to the lack of experiments that challenge our understanding. CERN is verifying very old existing theories, not challenging them. All this is immensely valuable, but we need a new WTF moment to go to the next step.
You're responding to a guy who said nothing about politics.
I think you have some kind of mental fixation on socialism.
Your fixation is preventing from making interesting or even *relevant* commentary.
Please seek professional help.
This is just a semantic nitpick question about terminology. (I am not a chemist. Nor a physicist. So, humor me if this question is stupid.)
Should we think of Hydrogen as being metal -- one that happens to have been given a bad rap in the past because the "right" temperature/pressure point where it's metalic-ness would have been obvious, just happens not to be exactly common in our everyday experience. In the taxonomy of elements, isn't a given element on periodic table either considered a metal or not?
Or is hydrogen qualitatively different, somehow? e.g. is it semiconductor like Silicon?
Also, are there any other elements with metalic/non-metalic versions of (say) their solid states?
If we add a bit of oxygen to the mix, might we get metal water?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
If this new super-lightweight metal can't be used to finally build me a flying car, I don't care about it... :) smiley face included for the humour impaired.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
I think you responded to the literal interpretation of GP's argument, without addressing the more reasonable interpretation, that is, are there better things to be researching?
For the people who are interested in doing this particular study, no, there is nothing better for them to research.
If someone told you to abandon a project you are interested in doing, and go do something else instead, simply because they think their project is more worthy than the one you are currently working on, what would say to them?
Unless you are Mother Theresa, you'd quite likely tell them to go do it themselves if they think it's so bloody important, and I think that is also what these scientists would say to you.
There is no universal agreement about what is important and what isn't, and there is no mandate for anyone to redirect their time and resources to what you think is important.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Next 2:00AM Tweet: "We got something you don't got #Putin" "I'm going golfing tomorrow #Putin Ha ha"
This is exactly the type of thing they want their future US research dollars going into. None of that wasted warm-whatever research, its millions of new manufacturing jobs on the line! Those Chinese and Mexicans still have a long way to to go to catch up before making that cheap stuff. We will just tax it at the border, raising our own prices, to pay for the wall that they will just swim around, dig under, or buy a plane ticket to fly over legally. We'll show them who's really paying for that wall!
No, not at all, certainly not "by definition." This story in particular was only 83 K and yet was half way to terapascals. Things like white dwarfs would have pressures in the petapascals, yet will cool off a lot of time to cold temperatures. The pressure doesn't go away.
If someone told you to abandon a project you are interested in doing, and go do something else instead, simply because they think their project is more worthy than the one you are currently working on, what would say to them?
I have said, "Okay, thanks for considering it" and moved on. Because that is exactly what happens when a grant proposal gets denied: the grant agency thinks there are more important things that should be done than what you proposed, even at times when there is a sunk cost already.
Kelvin is not measured in degrees, in case you wondered.
This. Fundamental research is never fruitless. Who knows what may come out of this?
Fruit?
I assume that one person got to "hand crank" whatever apparatus they had to operate the diamond anvil...
Which means someone forevermore at nerdy parties is going to be able to say (preferably in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice), that they are so "pumped up" that they can "Crush Hydrogen so much it turns into metal!"...
Bonus points if they mention the fact that it could potentially be "liquid metal" and some ominous reference to T-1000.