The folks at New Scientist have an article up at their site on a new state of matter. Be sure to think through the implications real hard.

Y'know, when I read something this heavy into 'theory about the way the universe works' I wonder if, a hundred or two years from now some egg head is going to totally disprove 99% of all theories we currently opperate under and prove that Newton was only half right or some thing...

And all this stuff we've been doing with almost no practical value, but lots of theoretical value (superstring theory? Space as a giant slurpy straw of 27 dimensions?) is going to wind up flushed straight down the drain.

Just like almost all the science of 'how everything works' before Newton was....:haw:

Quote from: SpikeY'know, when I read something this heavy into 'theory about the way the universe works' I wonder if, a hundred or two years from now some egg head is going to totally disprove 99% of all theories we currently opperate under and prove that Newton was only half right or some thing...

And all this stuff we've been doing with almost no practical value, but lots of theoretical value (superstring theory? Space as a giant slurpy straw of 27 dimensions?) is going to wind up flushed straight down the drain.

Just like almost all the science of 'how everything works' before Newton was....:haw:

That's the thing about science, you can't tell before hand what is going to work out. You did read the article by the way? Saw the bit about how a certain crystal may provide the basis for a new computer hardware architecture?

Always remember that mistakes have value, for the mistakes you make teach you not to try that again.

Yeah, I read it, I got to the part where they started about talking quantum computers and left off there.

What I really see happening is some poor bastard making a perfectly valid point using the 'three states of matter' and some jackass ignoring what he's saying by pointing out Plasma is the fourth state of matter, then some other jackass who hasn't even been listening popping in to score points with 'threaded liquids'...

None of which means a god damn compared to whatever point the first poor bastard was trying to make.  

Which is a backwards way of saying there is 'functional knowledge' and then there is 'extra shit' that doesn't mean anything outside of theoretical eggheads who are currently some five hundred years beyond what the practical eggheads can do anything usefull with.  

-Spike, who has the cold barren soul of an engineer....

Commisserations. Thing is, new discoveries have a way of sneaking up, buggering you roundly, and then convincing you that not only is it necessary, it's vital to your health.

Edit: BTW, consider Herbertsmithite, a mineral with a triangular crystal. Could well be our first known sample of a string-net liquid. Which would give us 5 states of matter.

Lecturer: In the days of Classical Greece matter was said to be composed of four elements; air, earth, fire, and water. Today we know that matter comes in four forms; gaseous, solid, plasma, and liquid.

Quote from: mythusmageLecturer: In the days of Classical Greece matter was said to be composed of four elements; air, earth, fire, and water. Today we know that matter comes in four forms; gaseous, solid, plasma, and liquid.

and Bose-Einstein condensates.  Among others

:haw:

And a theoretical additional state at absolute zero...

Yeah, yeah, crazy moon theory ... until people make it real.  Which, y'know, the article is positing that they may have done.

Somewhere out at MIT is a chunk of mineral that they made which is showing properties like nothing ever recorded in the history of science.  Properties, in fact, that the current science doesn't explain real well.

So theory has inspired people to carefully create something concrete.  Now you can (a) analyze the concrete thing to get more theory and more importantly, (b) figure out ways to use that concrete thing, without caring about how it does what it does.

Quantum computing's got some damn nice prospects, if they can figure out the input-and-output problems.  It's the same problem as optical computing in many ways ... the cool stuff is a small chunk of not-very-much that you can say hypothetically "Oh, yeah, it's running a program!" but then you have to encase it in so much crud in order to be able to (a) change the program and (b) prove that anything's happening at all, that in the end you're better off buying something from Dell.

Today, that is.

TonyLB: I got the impression that they came up with the theory and then found the rock that supports it.  Now, that sounds perfectly reasonable, but I keep thinking about the numerology theory in the Illuminatus Trilogy...

Dude... I'm getting a Dell.

Quote from: SpikeTonyLB: I got the impression that they came up with the theory and then found the rock that supports it.  Now, that sounds perfectly reasonable, but I keep thinking about the numerology theory in the Illuminatus Trilogy...

Dude... I'm getting a Dell.

More like they came up with the hypothesis, and then found that a mineral supports it. It's still early, there's still more to be learned.

Quote from: SpikeTonyLB: I got the impression that they came up with the theory and then found the rock that supports it.  Now, that sounds perfectly reasonable, but I keep thinking about the numerology theory in the Illuminatus Trilogy...

My reading on the article was that they found a mineral that seemed like it might do some funky stuff in its pure form, but the pure form doesn't exist in nature ... so they synthesized it.

And then, lo and behold, the pure (synthesized) mineral exhibited qualities that were (a) much like what they predicted and (b) like nothing else in nature.  Specifically:

• Every other material ever looked at loses its magnetic properties as it gets colder than 26 kelvin ... this one doesn't.
  
• Every other material changes its heat conduction below a certain temperature threshold.  Not this one.

It doesn't look, to me, like they're making a mountain out of a molehill ... it looks like they've genuinely found some stuff that calls into question a lot of what people previously thought were the rules.

Quote from: mythusmageMore like they came up with the hypothesis, and then found that a mineral supports it. It's still early, there's still more to be learned.

That's what I said, only minus the fancy talk.

Quote from: TonyLBMy reading on the article was that they found a mineral that seemed like it might do some funky stuff in its pure form, but the pure form doesn't exist in nature ... so they synthesized it.

And then, lo and behold, the pure (synthesized) mineral exhibited qualities that were (a) much like what they predicted and (b) like nothing else in nature.  Specifically:

• Every other material ever looked at loses its magnetic properties as it gets colder than 26 kelvin ... this one doesn't.
  
• Every other material changes its heat conduction below a certain temperature threshold.  Not this one.

It doesn't look, to me, like they're making a mountain out of a molehill ... it looks like they've genuinely found some stuff that calls into question a lot of what people previously thought were the rules.

Ya. But just finding that if you make a synthetic something that does some stuff nothing else does doesn't make it magical proof of anything. It just means it does some stuff that other stuff doesn't do.  I mean, looked at in isolation of our history with it, Silicon that can be turned into glass is pretty weird stuff... it doesn't mean we've discovered some new theory of everything...

Bah... don't mind me, I'm being the devils advocate nothing more, nothing less.

This part boggled me:

The pair ran simulations to see if their string-nets could give rise to conventional particles and fractionally charged quasi-particles. They did. They also found something even more surprising. As the net of strings vibrated, it produced a wave that behaved according to a very familiar set of laws - Maxwell's equations, which describe the behaviour of light. "A hundred and fifty years after Maxwell wrote them down, here they emerged by accident," says Wen.

That wasn't all. They found that their model naturally gave rise to other elementary particles, such as quarks, which make up protons and neutrons, and the particles responsible for some of the fundamental forces, such as gluons and the W and Z bosons.

From this, the researchers made another leap. Could the entire universe be modelled in a similar way? "Suddenly we realised, maybe the vacuum of our whole universe is a string-net liquid," says Wen. "It would provide a unified explanation of how both light and matter arise." So in their theory elementary particles are not the fundamental building blocks of matter. Instead, they emerge from the deeper structure of the non-empty vacuum of space-time.

Whoa!

Quote from: SpikeYa. But just finding that if you make a synthetic something that does some stuff nothing else does doesn't make it magical proof of anything. It just means it does some stuff that other stuff doesn't do.  I mean, looked at in isolation of our history with it, Silicon that can be turned into glass is pretty weird stuff... it doesn't mean we've discovered some new theory of everything...

Bah... don't mind me, I'm being the devils advocate nothing more, nothing less.

Hey, somebody's gotta keep us from careening off the road.