Pinfeldorf If you a want a mostly-lay-language walk through of a lot of quantum mechanics, general relativity, all that mind bending fun stuff, Brian Greene's books are a decent starting point (heads up, he did go deep down the string theory rabbit hole for a while there).
IIRC the usual argument for the existence of localized order is non uniform entropy decay rates, and the idea that locally entropy can be temporarily reduced through an external energetic input, but when analysed as part of a broader or more complete system will still result in an overall increase, eg the sun blasting out mind boggling amounts of energy allows for local entropic reversal within some parts of the solar system but these local effects are dwarfed by the solar system's overall entropy measure. (The corollary is that the starting point of the universe was an incredibly compacted, highly ordered state with an unimaginable amount of stored potential energy). I have no idea how quantum complexity theory ties into this at all, but I bet its interesting.
My favorite part of quantum mechanics is that, because I’m dumb, it all sounds like the wild ramblings of someone on psychedelics describing universal truths. like I can still kinda get what they’re laying down conceptually (if not mathematically) and see that they put the work into it. There’s just like no way to talk about it in anything but dry academic tones without sounding mad as a hatter.
Pinfeldorf If you a want a mostly-lay-language walk through of a lot of quantum mechanics, general relativity, all that mind bending fun stuff, Brian Greene's books are a decent starting point (heads up, he did go deep down the string theory rabbit hole for a while there).
IIRC the usual argument for the existence of localized order is non uniform entropy decay rates, and the idea that locally entropy can be temporarily reduced through an external energetic input, but when analysed as part of a broader or more complete system will still result in an overall increase, eg the sun blasting out mind boggling amounts of energy allows for local entropic reversal within some parts of the solar system but these local effects are dwarfed by the solar system's overall entropy measure. (The corollary is that the starting point of the universe was an incredibly compacted, highly ordered state with an unimaginable amount of stored potential energy). I have no idea how quantum complexity theory ties into this at all, but I bet its interesting.
My favorite part of quantum mechanics is that, because I’m dumb, it all sounds like the wild ramblings of someone on psychedelics describing universal truths. like I can still kinda get what they’re laying down conceptually (if not mathematically) and see that they put the work into it. There’s just like no way to talk about it in anything but dry academic tones without sounding mad as a hatter.
Think of it like dropping a rock into a pond. If you want to measure the speed at which the waves propagate, you would focus on a section of the pond, and measure how many waves pass through that section in a given time period. Since you know the length you are observing and are measuring the time interval between waves, you can calculate the speed as length divided by time. If you want a more accurate speed reading, you would measure multiple waves passing through. Once a wave passes through your area, though, you know longer know where it is.
Conversely, when you want to know the position of the wave, you are just looking at one of the waves. Since you need measurements from at least two waves to establish the speed, you can't garner any information about the speed of the wave.
Applying this analogy to electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light), and you find out that the more you know about the speed of a particle, the less you can know about the position of it. For a particle, you can measure position by bouncing off a light ray and determining where the bounce occurred at. However, the change in direction of the light also causes a change in speed in the particle.
Conversely, to measure the speed, you use the fact that light is a wave and can travel around the particle rather than interacting with it, so you can use the wavelength of the light to determine the speed of the particle, but in this way it can't determine the position, because there is no interaction.
This sets a lower boundary on our combined knowledge of position and speed, or to state it another way, it limits our accuracy.
What quantum mechanics does is recognize that there is this limitation, and takes a statistical approach to any information below this threshold. I/E what is the chance that a particle is in a location or at a speed.
This is why things like the old model of an atom with the electrons flying around the nucleus in set patterns has been abandoned, and now physicists talk about the electron cloud. Because we can either know very well the position or the speed of an electron in orbit around the nucleus, but not both.
This leads us to the ability to model things like nuclear decay, because we can calculate the probability that nuclear decay will occur by modeling the electrons around the nucleus and calculating the probability that they will group up sufficiently such that their repulsive force against the protons in the nucleus causes the ejection of a proton (alpha decay) and this decay results in the splitting of an atom (like uranium). The reason that all very high atomic number particles undergo nuclear decay is that the nucleus has grown large enough to interact more easily with the electron cloud, thus increasing the probability of an event over a given time period.
+9
DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
Pinfeldorf If you a want a mostly-lay-language walk through of a lot of quantum mechanics, general relativity, all that mind bending fun stuff, Brian Greene's books are a decent starting point (heads up, he did go deep down the string theory rabbit hole for a while there).
IIRC the usual argument for the existence of localized order is non uniform entropy decay rates, and the idea that locally entropy can be temporarily reduced through an external energetic input, but when analysed as part of a broader or more complete system will still result in an overall increase, eg the sun blasting out mind boggling amounts of energy allows for local entropic reversal within some parts of the solar system but these local effects are dwarfed by the solar system's overall entropy measure. (The corollary is that the starting point of the universe was an incredibly compacted, highly ordered state with an unimaginable amount of stored potential energy). I have no idea how quantum complexity theory ties into this at all, but I bet its interesting.
My favorite part of quantum mechanics is that, because I’m dumb, it all sounds like the wild ramblings of someone on psychedelics describing universal truths. like I can still kinda get what they’re laying down conceptually (if not mathematically) and see that they put the work into it. There’s just like no way to talk about it in anything but dry academic tones without sounding mad as a hatter.
Think of it like dropping a rock into a pond. If you want to measure the speed at which the waves propagate, you would focus on a section of the pond, and measure how many waves pass through that section in a given time period. Since you know the length you are observing and are measuring the time interval between waves, you can calculate the speed as length divided by time. If you want a more accurate speed reading, you would measure multiple waves passing through. Once a wave passes through your area, though, you know longer know where it is.
Conversely, when you want to know the position of the wave, you are just looking at one of the waves. Since you need measurements from at least two waves to establish the speed, you can't garner any information about the speed of the wave.
Applying this analogy to electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light), and you find out that the more you know about the speed of a particle, the less you can know about the position of it. For a particle, you can measure position by bouncing off a light ray and determining where the bounce occurred at. However, the change in direction of the light also causes a change in speed in the particle.
Conversely, to measure the speed, you use the fact that light is a wave and can travel around the particle rather than interacting with it, so you can use the wavelength of the light to determine the speed of the particle, but in this way it can't determine the position, because there is no interaction.
This sets a lower boundary on our combined knowledge of position and speed, or to state it another way, it limits our accuracy.
What quantum mechanics does is recognize that there is this limitation, and takes a statistical approach to any information below this threshold. I/E what is the chance that a particle is in a location or at a speed.
This is why things like the old model of an atom with the electrons flying around the nucleus in set patterns has been abandoned, and now physicists talk about the electron cloud. Because we can either know very well the position or the speed of an electron in orbit around the nucleus, but not both.
This leads us to the ability to model things like nuclear decay, because we can calculate the probability that nuclear decay will occur by modeling the electrons around the nucleus and calculating the probability that they will group up sufficiently such that their repulsive force against the protons in the nucleus causes the ejection of a proton (alpha decay) and this decay results in the splitting of an atom (like uranium). The reason that all very high atomic number particles undergo nuclear decay is that the nucleus has grown large enough to interact more easily with the electron cloud, thus increasing the probability of an event over a given time period.
I know what most of those words mean individually and almost none of them make sense in that order
So LK99 is an alleged room temperature, low pressure superconductor that was announced last week by a team in South Korea; the paper has yet to be peer reviewed but their documented method for creating LK99 is… strikingly simple, so plenty of scientists set out after the paper hit to replicate it.
One of them is a Russian trans woman who is basically doing this shit with the equipment she has on hand in her home
Presently we now hover between two states of outcomes:
recent report of room temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure in Cu-substituted apatite (`LK99') has invigorated interest in the understanding of what materials and mechanisms can allow for high-temperature superconductivity. Here I perform density functional theory calculations on Cu-substituted lead phosphate apatite, identifying correlated isolated flat bands at the Fermi level, a common signature of high transition temperatures in already established families of superconductors. I elucidate the origins of these isolated bands as arising from a structural distortion induced by the Cu ions and a chiral charge density wave from the Pb lone pairs. These results suggest that a minimal two-band model can encompass much of the low-energy physics in this system. Finally, I discuss the implications of my results on possible superconductivity in Cu-doped apatite
Because I’m missing half a decade’s worth of relevant university classes (I went into the humanities because calculus and I turned out to be mortal enemies), I understand so fucking little of what they wrote so here’s this other rando putting it in a way I could process:
National Lab (LBNL) results support LK-99 as a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor.
Simulations published 1 hour ago on arxiv support LK-99 as the holy grail of modern material science and applied physics.
(arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892)
Here's the plain-english explanation:
- The simulations modeled what the original Korean authors proposed was happening to their material - where copper atoms were percolating into a crystal structure and replacing lead atoms, causing the crystal to strain slightly and contract by 0.5%. This unique structure was proposed to allow this amazing property.
- @sineatrix from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab simulated this using heavy-duty compute power from the Department of Energy, and looked to see what would happen to the 'electronic structure' of this material, meaning, what are the available conduction pathways in the material.
- It turns out that there are conduction pathways for electrons that are in just the right conditions and places that would enable them to 'superconduct'. More specifically, they were close to the 'Fermi Surface' which is like the sea-level of electrical energy, as in '0 ft above sea-level.' It's believed currently that the more conduction pathways close to the Fermi surface, the higher the temperature you can superconduct at (An analogy might be how its easier for planes to fly close to the surface of the ocean due to the 'ground effect' that gives them more lift.)
This plot in particular shows the 'bands', or electron pathways, crossing above and below the Fermi surface.
- Lastly, these interesting conduction pathways only form when the copper atom percolates into the less likely location in the crystal lattice, or the 'higher energy' binding site. This means the material would be difficult to synthesize since only a small fraction of crystal gets its copper in just the right location.
This is insanely bullish for humanity.
…
Just as a note - this is a gross simplification of these results. Energy bands are not really 'conduction pathways' since the electrons are not moving, but rather, they are places the electrons are most likely to be found.
There is a lot more going on here in the weeds!
But again, rando (he says he’s a nuclear fusion engineer but I got no way to verify that right now), caveats, grain of salt
There have been a lot of weird science things that broke my brain over the years, but learning that electrons don't really flow like you'd expect and it's all crazy magnetic field shenanigans is the one that breaks it the most I think.
So yay potentially having a way for them to not flow even faster.
I know this is a big deal if true (and also hilarious if it ends up being copper and iron) but I'm still unclear as to how it will revolutionize our world.
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited August 2
Utterly insane energy efficiency.
Superconductors can transport energy with very little resistance, which means very low energy loss to do the same thing.
The most basic level is that all energy costs for anything using this become fantastically cheaper. That opens doors for exciting things that currently remain firmly closed, but also just makes general quality of life much easier because $$$$$$ becomes $.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Reports that it's been repro'd twice are pretty premature though. Like, showing some levitation doesn't mean it's superconductive, it means it's diamagnetic. Zero peer reviews. One simulation study. Multiple failed repros. The red flag count is still extremely high.
Reports that it's been repro'd twice are pretty premature though. Like, showing some levitation doesn't mean it's superconductive, it means it's diamagnetic. Zero peer reviews. One simulation study. Multiple failed repros. The red flag count is still extremely high.
You know how one of the major issues with solar is that the best places to get it are remote and you then lose a bunch of power transferring it across the great distances to population centers?
Yeah I’m guessing a room temperature superconductor would greatly help with that problem.
Sleep on
+1
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
As a general rule, when people say they've found the holy grail approach with skepticism.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
You know how one of the major issues with solar is that the best places to get it are remote and you then lose a bunch of power transferring it across the great distances to population centers?
Yeah I’m guessing a room temperature superconductor would greatly help with that problem.
but line loss isn't really a problem? like rural populations and power generators exist already
One of the reasons you can't load up the desert with solar panels and wind mills is that there is loss along the cable. The longer the cable, the more the loss. This is basically the resistance x distance. Negating this would help the energy future, but wouldn't immediately revolutionize everything. It's more that future projects may be cheaper, and the price of electricity starts dropping further over time. Electric infra is huge and replacing it all would take many decades. And if current situation is good enough it may not be worthwhile. You'd get a superconductor line into big urban areas, and keep the old ones for lower population.
The other part is magnets. Superconductors make the best magnets, but the cooling on current ones is a giant headache. They're cooled on liquid helium, the single element that we could run out of over time because if it gets in the air it flies off into space. Modern designs are pretty good at preventing leakage but it's expensive to make and maintain. The immediate thing is MRIs and scientific research (particle accelerators, NMR). No doubt people have other plans, but I don't immediately see it (For instance I don't think the magnetic part of mag-lev trains is the issue, it's the giant investment and having to get the straight line to lay the track, which becomes harder and harder as population rises.)
It would help society forward, but this is not the steam engine or the internet.
There's also the funky magnetic properties of superconductors. The majority of the bulk of modern MRI machines is the cooling for the superconductive loop that generates its magnetic field. My dad is quite badly claustrophobic and had to get a few scans a few years ago and it was a nightmarish experience for him. If you could use a room temperature material for the loop instead then you could both make the volume within the loop much larger and also drastically reduce the operating costs since you don't need to keep its liquid helium coolant topped up. There's also the potential for energy storage, the magnetic field in the MRI machine is from a current running constantly around the loop without loss, it would be possible to use that as an energy storage medium, although much like using it for power transmission, if the superconductivity breaks down at a sufficiently low temperature, or with a sufficiently weak magnetic field, then its use in large scale civilian infrastructure would be limited. If the superconductivity works fine at average room temperature but not above, for example, 30°C, then there would absolutely be a huge number of potential applications for it, but having your entire power grid suddenly become highly resistant to current all at once if a heatwave hit would result in a fairly catastrophic amount of energy getting dumped into the lines.
Would a room temperature superconductor also have computer circuitry applications?
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
As a general rule, when people say they've found the holy grail approach with skepticism.
I completely agree, and it always makes me so sad I'll probably never see some huge, groundbreaking discovery that changes everything. Or if I do see it, I won't realize it until way later (or I'll die first)
Or I will live to see one, but capitalism will ruin it and any chance it has of helping humanity just like it always does.
As a general rule, when people say they've found the holy grail approach with skepticism.
I completely agree, and it always makes me so sad I'll probably never see some huge, groundbreaking discovery that changes everything. Or if I do see it, I won't realize it until way later (or I'll die first)
Or I will live to see one, but capitalism will ruin it and any chance it has of helping humanity just like it always does.
The problem with recognizing the discovery is that it doesn't produce an amazing thing we could recognize as groundbreaking. It's the "oh, that's interesting..." muttered in the lab, not the amazing thing you hold in your hand as a consumer.
You have lived through at least one groundbreaking discovery, the confirmation of gravity waves. It is a discovery that can set the course of physics and human discovery like quantum mechanics before it, but its impact on you or me won't even start to be felt for decades yet.
This is all reminding me of that XKCD comic about betting against new groundbreaking discoveries because if it's fake you get a lot of money, and if it's real then it will be so exciting you won't miss the money
+1
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Science rarely has those 'huge, groundbreaking discoveries.' It's often incremental changes that happen over the course of time.
Like, we only recently discovered that black holes actually exist. We've known that they should exist for a while, but only recently was it confirmed.
Even with shit like the telephone or internet, it started out small and gradually got bigger. High-speed internet is groundbreaking, gamechanging, but it happened so gradually and incrementally that you might not perceive it as such.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
Speaking of groundbreaking research that has me suspicious because it sounds too good and I'm cynical, and even if it is legit there's a long way to go to making it a real practical product to help things, but I sure hope they're legit: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-07-newly-discovered-antibodies-neutralize-covid-variants.html Supposedly a team from several reputable universities around the world might have isolated an antibody protein that disables the coronavirus family quite broadly and could be used to make a pan-coronavirus vaccine and treatment for infection, if I'm reading that right, and it's real and not baseless sensationalism. But big ifs.
+10
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
Science rarely has those 'huge, groundbreaking discoveries.' It's often incremental changes that happen over the course of time.
Like, we only recently discovered that black holes actually exist. We've known that they should exist for a while, but only recently was it confirmed.
Even with shit like the telephone or internet, it started out small and gradually got bigger. High-speed internet is groundbreaking, gamechanging, but it happened so gradually and incrementally that you might not perceive it as such.
One of my favourite 'Black Holes are recent' anecdotes is how they were so new that Star Trek (TOS) had Spock refer to 'Black Stars' because the theory was speculative and not yet established so nomenclature hadn't standardised at that point.
Pinfeldorf If you a want a mostly-lay-language walk through of a lot of quantum mechanics, general relativity, all that mind bending fun stuff, Brian Greene's books are a decent starting point (heads up, he did go deep down the string theory rabbit hole for a while there).
IIRC the usual argument for the existence of localized order is non uniform entropy decay rates, and the idea that locally entropy can be temporarily reduced through an external energetic input, but when analysed as part of a broader or more complete system will still result in an overall increase, eg the sun blasting out mind boggling amounts of energy allows for local entropic reversal within some parts of the solar system but these local effects are dwarfed by the solar system's overall entropy measure. (The corollary is that the starting point of the universe was an incredibly compacted, highly ordered state with an unimaginable amount of stored potential energy). I have no idea how quantum complexity theory ties into this at all, but I bet its interesting.
My favorite part of quantum mechanics is that, because I’m dumb, it all sounds like the wild ramblings of someone on psychedelics describing universal truths. like I can still kinda get what they’re laying down conceptually (if not mathematically) and see that they put the work into it. There’s just like no way to talk about it in anything but dry academic tones without sounding mad as a hatter.
Think of it like dropping a rock into a pond. If you want to measure the speed at which the waves propagate, you would focus on a section of the pond, and measure how many waves pass through that section in a given time period. Since you know the length you are observing and are measuring the time interval between waves, you can calculate the speed as length divided by time. If you want a more accurate speed reading, you would measure multiple waves passing through. Once a wave passes through your area, though, you know longer know where it is.
Conversely, when you want to know the position of the wave, you are just looking at one of the waves. Since you need measurements from at least two waves to establish the speed, you can't garner any information about the speed of the wave.
Applying this analogy to electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light), and you find out that the more you know about the speed of a particle, the less you can know about the position of it. For a particle, you can measure position by bouncing off a light ray and determining where the bounce occurred at. However, the change in direction of the light also causes a change in speed in the particle.
Conversely, to measure the speed, you use the fact that light is a wave and can travel around the particle rather than interacting with it, so you can use the wavelength of the light to determine the speed of the particle, but in this way it can't determine the position, because there is no interaction.
This sets a lower boundary on our combined knowledge of position and speed, or to state it another way, it limits our accuracy.
What quantum mechanics does is recognize that there is this limitation, and takes a statistical approach to any information below this threshold. I/E what is the chance that a particle is in a location or at a speed.
This is why things like the old model of an atom with the electrons flying around the nucleus in set patterns has been abandoned, and now physicists talk about the electron cloud. Because we can either know very well the position or the speed of an electron in orbit around the nucleus, but not both.
This leads us to the ability to model things like nuclear decay, because we can calculate the probability that nuclear decay will occur by modeling the electrons around the nucleus and calculating the probability that they will group up sufficiently such that their repulsive force against the protons in the nucleus causes the ejection of a proton (alpha decay) and this decay results in the splitting of an atom (like uranium). The reason that all very high atomic number particles undergo nuclear decay is that the nucleus has grown large enough to interact more easily with the electron cloud, thus increasing the probability of an event over a given time period.
I dont think thats an accurate description of nuclear decay or fission. Alpha decay isnt the ejection of a single proton - its the ejection of a helium-4 nucleus - 2 protons 2 neutrons which are all bonded together. Im pretty sure its more based on the arrangement and number/ratio of protons and neutrons in the nucleus and doesnt really care about the electrons orbiting around. If that were the case then ions would experience decay or fission at higher rates which i dont think is the case.
Fission and decay are based on the strong and weak nuclear forces, not electromagnetism. Protons want to push each other apart because of electromagnetic repulsion, but the nuclear bonding force between neutrons and protons is much stronger than that repulsive force.
Going back to the proton/neutron ratio thing. This is why you can have stable isotopes and unstable (radioactive) isotopes of the same element. The number of protons is the same but the number of neutrons is different. Too many neutrons and it wants to either fission or undergo some kind of decay.
Pinfeldorf If you a want a mostly-lay-language walk through of a lot of quantum mechanics, general relativity, all that mind bending fun stuff, Brian Greene's books are a decent starting point (heads up, he did go deep down the string theory rabbit hole for a while there).
IIRC the usual argument for the existence of localized order is non uniform entropy decay rates, and the idea that locally entropy can be temporarily reduced through an external energetic input, but when analysed as part of a broader or more complete system will still result in an overall increase, eg the sun blasting out mind boggling amounts of energy allows for local entropic reversal within some parts of the solar system but these local effects are dwarfed by the solar system's overall entropy measure. (The corollary is that the starting point of the universe was an incredibly compacted, highly ordered state with an unimaginable amount of stored potential energy). I have no idea how quantum complexity theory ties into this at all, but I bet its interesting.
My favorite part of quantum mechanics is that, because I’m dumb, it all sounds like the wild ramblings of someone on psychedelics describing universal truths. like I can still kinda get what they’re laying down conceptually (if not mathematically) and see that they put the work into it. There’s just like no way to talk about it in anything but dry academic tones without sounding mad as a hatter.
Think of it like dropping a rock into a pond. If you want to measure the speed at which the waves propagate, you would focus on a section of the pond, and measure how many waves pass through that section in a given time period. Since you know the length you are observing and are measuring the time interval between waves, you can calculate the speed as length divided by time. If you want a more accurate speed reading, you would measure multiple waves passing through. Once a wave passes through your area, though, you know longer know where it is.
Conversely, when you want to know the position of the wave, you are just looking at one of the waves. Since you need measurements from at least two waves to establish the speed, you can't garner any information about the speed of the wave.
Applying this analogy to electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light), and you find out that the more you know about the speed of a particle, the less you can know about the position of it. For a particle, you can measure position by bouncing off a light ray and determining where the bounce occurred at. However, the change in direction of the light also causes a change in speed in the particle.
Conversely, to measure the speed, you use the fact that light is a wave and can travel around the particle rather than interacting with it, so you can use the wavelength of the light to determine the speed of the particle, but in this way it can't determine the position, because there is no interaction.
This sets a lower boundary on our combined knowledge of position and speed, or to state it another way, it limits our accuracy.
What quantum mechanics does is recognize that there is this limitation, and takes a statistical approach to any information below this threshold. I/E what is the chance that a particle is in a location or at a speed.
This is why things like the old model of an atom with the electrons flying around the nucleus in set patterns has been abandoned, and now physicists talk about the electron cloud. Because we can either know very well the position or the speed of an electron in orbit around the nucleus, but not both.
This leads us to the ability to model things like nuclear decay, because we can calculate the probability that nuclear decay will occur by modeling the electrons around the nucleus and calculating the probability that they will group up sufficiently such that their repulsive force against the protons in the nucleus causes the ejection of a proton (alpha decay) and this decay results in the splitting of an atom (like uranium). The reason that all very high atomic number particles undergo nuclear decay is that the nucleus has grown large enough to interact more easily with the electron cloud, thus increasing the probability of an event over a given time period.
I dont think thats an accurate description of nuclear decay or fission. Alpha decay isnt the ejection of a single proton - its the ejection of a helium-4 nucleus - 2 protons 2 neutrons which are all bonded together. Im pretty sure its more based on the arrangement and number/ratio of protons and neutrons in the nucleus and doesnt really care about the electrons orbiting around. If that were the case then ions would experience decay or fission at higher rates which i dont think is the case.
Fission and decay are based on the strong and weak nuclear forces, not electromagnetism. Protons want to push each other apart because of electromagnetic repulsion, but the nuclear bonding force between neutrons and protons is much stronger than that repulsive force.
Going back to the proton/neutron ratio thing. This is why you can have stable isotopes and unstable (radioactive) isotopes of the same element. The number of protons is the same but the number of neutrons is different. Too many neutrons and it wants to either fission or undergo some kind of decay.
The residual strong nuclear force that binds the nucleus together is extremely short ranged. For alpha decay, the larger a nucleus gets, the more likely it is statistically that an alpha particle quantum tunnels enough distance that the electromagnetic repulsion of the protons can overcome the nuclear force holding the nucleus together and an alpha particle is ejected. This reduces the nucleus' size to a more stable configuration. Alpha particles are preferentially emitted compared to single protons or neutrons because it actually takes less energy for the entire alpha particle to break away than the individual proton/neutron would.
Beta decay is from the weak interaction of quarks of protons and neutrons changing a neutron into a proton by emitting an electron and antineutrino or changing a proton into a neutron by emitting a positron and neutrino.
SiliconStew on
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
quantum tunneling still freaks me out. I mean, everything should just tunnel out and collapse, but it doesn't. Instead there's only a tiny statistical chance that something will tunnel at any given time.
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
Pinfeldorf If you a want a mostly-lay-language walk through of a lot of quantum mechanics, general relativity, all that mind bending fun stuff, Brian Greene's books are a decent starting point (heads up, he did go deep down the string theory rabbit hole for a while there).
IIRC the usual argument for the existence of localized order is non uniform entropy decay rates, and the idea that locally entropy can be temporarily reduced through an external energetic input, but when analysed as part of a broader or more complete system will still result in an overall increase, eg the sun blasting out mind boggling amounts of energy allows for local entropic reversal within some parts of the solar system but these local effects are dwarfed by the solar system's overall entropy measure. (The corollary is that the starting point of the universe was an incredibly compacted, highly ordered state with an unimaginable amount of stored potential energy). I have no idea how quantum complexity theory ties into this at all, but I bet its interesting.
My favorite part of quantum mechanics is that, because I’m dumb, it all sounds like the wild ramblings of someone on psychedelics describing universal truths. like I can still kinda get what they’re laying down conceptually (if not mathematically) and see that they put the work into it. There’s just like no way to talk about it in anything but dry academic tones without sounding mad as a hatter.
Think of it like dropping a rock into a pond. If you want to measure the speed at which the waves propagate, you would focus on a section of the pond, and measure how many waves pass through that section in a given time period. Since you know the length you are observing and are measuring the time interval between waves, you can calculate the speed as length divided by time. If you want a more accurate speed reading, you would measure multiple waves passing through. Once a wave passes through your area, though, you know longer know where it is.
Conversely, when you want to know the position of the wave, you are just looking at one of the waves. Since you need measurements from at least two waves to establish the speed, you can't garner any information about the speed of the wave.
Applying this analogy to electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light), and you find out that the more you know about the speed of a particle, the less you can know about the position of it. For a particle, you can measure position by bouncing off a light ray and determining where the bounce occurred at. However, the change in direction of the light also causes a change in speed in the particle.
Conversely, to measure the speed, you use the fact that light is a wave and can travel around the particle rather than interacting with it, so you can use the wavelength of the light to determine the speed of the particle, but in this way it can't determine the position, because there is no interaction.
This sets a lower boundary on our combined knowledge of position and speed, or to state it another way, it limits our accuracy.
What quantum mechanics does is recognize that there is this limitation, and takes a statistical approach to any information below this threshold. I/E what is the chance that a particle is in a location or at a speed.
This is why things like the old model of an atom with the electrons flying around the nucleus in set patterns has been abandoned, and now physicists talk about the electron cloud. Because we can either know very well the position or the speed of an electron in orbit around the nucleus, but not both.
This leads us to the ability to model things like nuclear decay, because we can calculate the probability that nuclear decay will occur by modeling the electrons around the nucleus and calculating the probability that they will group up sufficiently such that their repulsive force against the protons in the nucleus causes the ejection of a proton (alpha decay) and this decay results in the splitting of an atom (like uranium). The reason that all very high atomic number particles undergo nuclear decay is that the nucleus has grown large enough to interact more easily with the electron cloud, thus increasing the probability of an event over a given time period.
I dont think thats an accurate description of nuclear decay or fission. Alpha decay isnt the ejection of a single proton - its the ejection of a helium-4 nucleus - 2 protons 2 neutrons which are all bonded together. Im pretty sure its more based on the arrangement and number/ratio of protons and neutrons in the nucleus and doesnt really care about the electrons orbiting around. If that were the case then ions would experience decay or fission at higher rates which i dont think is the case.
Fission and decay are based on the strong and weak nuclear forces, not electromagnetism. Protons want to push each other apart because of electromagnetic repulsion, but the nuclear bonding force between neutrons and protons is much stronger than that repulsive force.
Going back to the proton/neutron ratio thing. This is why you can have stable isotopes and unstable (radioactive) isotopes of the same element. The number of protons is the same but the number of neutrons is different. Too many neutrons and it wants to either fission or undergo some kind of decay.
You are correct in that I used the wrong term, I was thinking of proton emission and not alpha decay. Alpha decay occurs because the configuration of 2P+2N is stable enough to survive the decay without being reabsorbed. Strong nuclear force acts over extremely short distances, and the size of very large atoms becomes such that they can at times cross the threshold of the limits of the strong nuclear force.
For those not following along, the number of retractions and failed experiments have reached the point where most scientific minds involved are pretty confident in saying that LK99 is nothing. In a situation like this it's worth remembering that part of the issue was that one guy from the study wanted to go ahead and leak "we totally did it" while everyone else didn't, while they were waiting for more testing. Guy wanted fame more than he wanted science.
For those not following along, the number of retractions and failed experiments have reached the point where most scientific minds involved are pretty confident in saying that LK99 is nothing. In a situation like this it's worth remembering that part of the issue was that one guy from the study wanted to go ahead and leak "we totally did it" while everyone else didn't, while they were waiting for more testing. Guy wanted fame more than he wanted science.
Bummer, but hardly surprising.
+6
Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
Muons are cool. Both literally and figuratively. To study them the ring is cooled to −269 °C! This could up-end our current understanding of the standard model.
Muons are cool. Both literally and figuratively. To study them the ring is cooled to −269 °C! This could up-end our current understanding of the standard model.
Posts
Oh, this is how @Houk the Namebringer got pink eye.
My favorite part of quantum mechanics is that, because I’m dumb, it all sounds like the wild ramblings of someone on psychedelics describing universal truths. like I can still kinda get what they’re laying down conceptually (if not mathematically) and see that they put the work into it. There’s just like no way to talk about it in anything but dry academic tones without sounding mad as a hatter.
Think of it like dropping a rock into a pond. If you want to measure the speed at which the waves propagate, you would focus on a section of the pond, and measure how many waves pass through that section in a given time period. Since you know the length you are observing and are measuring the time interval between waves, you can calculate the speed as length divided by time. If you want a more accurate speed reading, you would measure multiple waves passing through. Once a wave passes through your area, though, you know longer know where it is.
Conversely, when you want to know the position of the wave, you are just looking at one of the waves. Since you need measurements from at least two waves to establish the speed, you can't garner any information about the speed of the wave.
Applying this analogy to electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light), and you find out that the more you know about the speed of a particle, the less you can know about the position of it. For a particle, you can measure position by bouncing off a light ray and determining where the bounce occurred at. However, the change in direction of the light also causes a change in speed in the particle.
Conversely, to measure the speed, you use the fact that light is a wave and can travel around the particle rather than interacting with it, so you can use the wavelength of the light to determine the speed of the particle, but in this way it can't determine the position, because there is no interaction.
This sets a lower boundary on our combined knowledge of position and speed, or to state it another way, it limits our accuracy.
What quantum mechanics does is recognize that there is this limitation, and takes a statistical approach to any information below this threshold. I/E what is the chance that a particle is in a location or at a speed.
This is why things like the old model of an atom with the electrons flying around the nucleus in set patterns has been abandoned, and now physicists talk about the electron cloud. Because we can either know very well the position or the speed of an electron in orbit around the nucleus, but not both.
This leads us to the ability to model things like nuclear decay, because we can calculate the probability that nuclear decay will occur by modeling the electrons around the nucleus and calculating the probability that they will group up sufficiently such that their repulsive force against the protons in the nucleus causes the ejection of a proton (alpha decay) and this decay results in the splitting of an atom (like uranium). The reason that all very high atomic number particles undergo nuclear decay is that the nucleus has grown large enough to interact more easily with the electron cloud, thus increasing the probability of an event over a given time period.
Presently we now hover between two states of outcomes:
Or
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
Because I’m missing half a decade’s worth of relevant university classes (I went into the humanities because calculus and I turned out to be mortal enemies), I understand so fucking little of what they wrote so here’s this other rando putting it in a way I could process:
But again, rando (he says he’s a nuclear fusion engineer but I got no way to verify that right now), caveats, grain of salt
So yay potentially having a way for them to not flow even faster.
If it turns out to be true.
Superconductors can transport energy with very little resistance, which means very low energy loss to do the same thing.
The most basic level is that all energy costs for anything using this become fantastically cheaper. That opens doors for exciting things that currently remain firmly closed, but also just makes general quality of life much easier because $$$$$$ becomes $.
[Tinny Tim meter fills ever so the more]
Yeah I’m guessing a room temperature superconductor would greatly help with that problem.
but line loss isn't really a problem? like rural populations and power generators exist already
The other part is magnets. Superconductors make the best magnets, but the cooling on current ones is a giant headache. They're cooled on liquid helium, the single element that we could run out of over time because if it gets in the air it flies off into space. Modern designs are pretty good at preventing leakage but it's expensive to make and maintain. The immediate thing is MRIs and scientific research (particle accelerators, NMR). No doubt people have other plans, but I don't immediately see it (For instance I don't think the magnetic part of mag-lev trains is the issue, it's the giant investment and having to get the straight line to lay the track, which becomes harder and harder as population rises.)
It would help society forward, but this is not the steam engine or the internet.
Basically if it has anything to do with electricity there's probably an application for a room temp superconductor.
I completely agree, and it always makes me so sad I'll probably never see some huge, groundbreaking discovery that changes everything. Or if I do see it, I won't realize it until way later (or I'll die first)
Or I will live to see one, but capitalism will ruin it and any chance it has of helping humanity just like it always does.
The problem with recognizing the discovery is that it doesn't produce an amazing thing we could recognize as groundbreaking. It's the "oh, that's interesting..." muttered in the lab, not the amazing thing you hold in your hand as a consumer.
You have lived through at least one groundbreaking discovery, the confirmation of gravity waves. It is a discovery that can set the course of physics and human discovery like quantum mechanics before it, but its impact on you or me won't even start to be felt for decades yet.
Like, we only recently discovered that black holes actually exist. We've known that they should exist for a while, but only recently was it confirmed.
Even with shit like the telephone or internet, it started out small and gradually got bigger. High-speed internet is groundbreaking, gamechanging, but it happened so gradually and incrementally that you might not perceive it as such.
Supposedly a team from several reputable universities around the world might have isolated an antibody protein that disables the coronavirus family quite broadly and could be used to make a pan-coronavirus vaccine and treatment for infection, if I'm reading that right, and it's real and not baseless sensationalism. But big ifs.
One of my favourite 'Black Holes are recent' anecdotes is how they were so new that Star Trek (TOS) had Spock refer to 'Black Stars' because the theory was speculative and not yet established so nomenclature hadn't standardised at that point.
I dont think thats an accurate description of nuclear decay or fission. Alpha decay isnt the ejection of a single proton - its the ejection of a helium-4 nucleus - 2 protons 2 neutrons which are all bonded together. Im pretty sure its more based on the arrangement and number/ratio of protons and neutrons in the nucleus and doesnt really care about the electrons orbiting around. If that were the case then ions would experience decay or fission at higher rates which i dont think is the case.
Fission and decay are based on the strong and weak nuclear forces, not electromagnetism. Protons want to push each other apart because of electromagnetic repulsion, but the nuclear bonding force between neutrons and protons is much stronger than that repulsive force.
Going back to the proton/neutron ratio thing. This is why you can have stable isotopes and unstable (radioactive) isotopes of the same element. The number of protons is the same but the number of neutrons is different. Too many neutrons and it wants to either fission or undergo some kind of decay.
The residual strong nuclear force that binds the nucleus together is extremely short ranged. For alpha decay, the larger a nucleus gets, the more likely it is statistically that an alpha particle quantum tunnels enough distance that the electromagnetic repulsion of the protons can overcome the nuclear force holding the nucleus together and an alpha particle is ejected. This reduces the nucleus' size to a more stable configuration. Alpha particles are preferentially emitted compared to single protons or neutrons because it actually takes less energy for the entire alpha particle to break away than the individual proton/neutron would.
Beta decay is from the weak interaction of quarks of protons and neutrons changing a neutron into a proton by emitting an electron and antineutrino or changing a proton into a neutron by emitting a positron and neutrino.
You are correct in that I used the wrong term, I was thinking of proton emission and not alpha decay. Alpha decay occurs because the configuration of 2P+2N is stable enough to survive the decay without being reabsorbed. Strong nuclear force acts over extremely short distances, and the size of very large atoms becomes such that they can at times cross the threshold of the limits of the strong nuclear force.
Bummer, but hardly surprising.
Muons are cool. Both literally and figuratively. To study them the ring is cooled to −269 °C! This could up-end our current understanding of the standard model.
Pretty wild that a difference in the value of g of just 0.00000000259 from expected could imply wholly new particles or forces in physics.
Gotta squint real hard in it's general direction