Scientists Create New Form of Matter 448
soren100 writes "Yahoo News has a story about scientists creating a sixth form of matter. They are calling their new state of matter a 'fermionic condensate.' Somehow they got potassium atoms to form pairs similar to the 'Cooper pairs' that make superconducting possible. Maybe any quantum physicists around can tell us more about this, but it certainly sounds pretty revolutionary. The scientists are predicting that this will lead to 'room temperature solid' superconductors, which in turn will enable us to have better electricity generators, more efficient electric motors, and (our favorite) cheaper maglev trains."
American Scientific Dominance (Score:-1, Insightful)
Practical application (Score:3, Insightful)
i was promised maglevs! (Score:5, Insightful)
maglevs always seem to be just around the corner... perpetually...
Animal experiments (Score:2, Insightful)
You militant assholes should refuse medical help when the cops beat you up next time.
Superconductor hype (Score:5, Insightful)
I really dont see superconductors becoming feasable at room temperatures anytime soon (i.e. 100 years) unless we all decide we actually like it when our rooms are well below freezing.
New forms of matter are interesting - but that they are found only at a billionth of a degree above absolute zero is no more interesting to me than the fact that we can build a fridge able to get stuff down to those temperatures in the first place. I'd be scared if we didn't find some spooky stuff going on!
Re:Quandry (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is bad because...? To put it bluntly, that's a bit elitist attitude, "if you can't understand this thing, you shouldn't even think about it, just go and do your daily work and pay your taxes so scientists get their grants and particle accelerators, don't bother your little brain with this stuff".
Anything that makes layman more familiar with basic scientific research and principles and generally interested in those is good IMHO, even if they get it a bit wrong.
Arguable (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a Quantum Physicist by any stretch, just a Materials Engineer. But it seems to me that the condensates have a small issue about them. They seem to hold an extremely narrow definition of a material.
Considering solid, gases, liquids, and even plasmas, they all have a range of environmental factors within which they can exist and have some level of application/interaction to the rest of the newtonian universe. I'm not disputing that they are able to get all these little bits together, but at a billionth of a fraction above absolute zero? That's going to make for a pretty cold ride on the maglev
Sensationalism at its best (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quandry (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that the majority of the people who read
What, precisely, is wrong with explaining science to the general populace? I would consider such a thing a laudable goal, regardless of discipline to be disseminated, not only because of the sheer enlightenment value, but also because a population taught to think scientifically and flexibly, as from exposure to the sciences, is far more difficult to manipulate than one that has no understanding of any of it!
Re:Too many references to superconductors (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I'm sorry -- is this your field? Yes, now I understand. You are entirely qualified to discuss the viabilities of this research for the purposes of application now or down the road, you brilliant slashdotter, you.
Just what makes that "fact?" Surely facts are universal -- so would I be getting a reflection of that if I went to a chemistry Ph.D. friend of mine (who happens to specialize in development of superconductors) and asked about honest prospects regarding applications?
Smacks like "gotta tell them at least about some possible application to keep us funded"-talk.
Smacks of "if it ain't instant gratification it's worthless"-talk to me, actually...
Re:Practical application (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't let them off that easily. They're part of a broken system whose causes can be found all over our society.
- We have a public that's incredibly ignorant of science... which is a compliment, considering that they're mostly just stupid.
- We have ignorant politicians elected by that ignorant/stupid public who don't understand science well enough to know how we should be spending public funds.
- And back to the Scientists: We have a Scientific community with members who lie their asses off like a bunch of whores for money. No one "forces" them to lie, they do it of their own volition.
- Finally, we have supporters of Science in the public who make excuses for poor ethical behavior by saying "scientists are forced by our society to lie".
The answer to most of these problems is "education". Education, education, education. Besides the defense of our borders, it's the one thing that our government absolutely must provide: a solid education for every member of our society.
Re:Too many references to superconductors (Score:5, Insightful)
Ooh...this sort of comment makes me mad. There's no possible way anyone can know what will come out of any fundamental research tomorrow, a year from now, or ten years from now. Many, many conveniences of modern day life sprang forth from researches into the most arcane of topics.
It especially gets me in this particular case, because we're talking about research that will likely bear as much fruit as the early 1900's physics research that later served as the foundation for the modern transistor.
I shall not be as vainglorious as to assume I can say it better than it's already been said, so let's see what a few of the titans had to say on this...
Hardy is speaking of his contributions in general, of which the search for prime numbers was significant, one of the most abstruse and abstract areas of pure mathematics one could name at the time of the research. Even this, however, in a mere 70 years yielded important practical applications in public key encryption.Bertrand Russell spent much of his time trying to find a definition of "number" in terms of pure logic, having found a flaw in Gottleb Frege's attempt to do the same. This was the purest of pure intellection and Russell himself would have hooted with laughter if you'd asked him about practical applications at the time. He even found himself wondering: "It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend his time on such trivialities..."
In fact, Russell's work eventually brought forth Principia Mathematica, a key development in the modern study of the foundations of mathematics. Among the fruits of that study have been, so far, nothing less than victory in World War II (at least, victory at lower cost than would otherwise have been possible) and machines like the one on which I type this.
I just previewed this post and read it, and I realized I've used words like "vainglorious" and "intellection". I've clearly been watching too much Dennis Miller.
sevOK, I'm not a quantum physicist (Score:1, Insightful)
Essentially, you have two types of particles. Bosons, of which there can exist infinitely many in the same state (place, time, energy and such), and fermions, of which no two can occupy the same state. For the more physics geek among us: Bosons have an integral spin, fermions have halve-valued spins.
In superconducting material, two electrons (fermions) bind together to form a boson (2 x 1/2 = integer), which form a sort of Bose-Einstein condensate in matter, creating superconduction. (This is a higher hand-waving physics explanation, but this space is too short to explain it fully).
What the news is now, is that they have now done this, not for electrons in a material, but for actual atoms. Not sure how this can be used for superconduction at high (liquid nitrogen) temperatures though.
this is really cool (Score:3, Insightful)
"They cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree C above absolute zero or minus 459 degrees F -- which is the point at which matter stops moving. "
So you have something that could bring a superconductor closer, which would save HUUUGGGEEE amount of energy. Only 1 thing... you need to cool it down to minus 459 degrees F. And that would cost exactly how much energy???
Re:When can I buy a coil of it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the point is the process, or some future decendant of it, will produce materials that will superconduct AFTER it is warmed up to room temperature. That this is only the first step to creating new, heretofore unknown superconductors that will perform to different specs.
As for how it would be economical, which I think your point is: how economical is the process that builds silicon processors? How incredibly, ridiculously persnickity and expensive. But economies of scale and massive investment by both government and private concerns made factories theat could turn out enough chips to change the world.
Superconducting materials at room temperature will change so many things. Motors. Power transmission. Industrial manufacturing. Transportation. No matter how hard it is to make the room temperature superconductors, it would be more expensive NOT to make them. It'll be done.
Re:Practical application (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoa, wait a moment here, it's now accepted and good behavior of corporations to lie to get at your money. They lie about their products to get money from their customers, they lie about their business perspectives (as much as they are allowed to) to get money from shareholders, and they lie, bitch and whine to politicians (e.g. lobbying) to get laws bend their way and be subsidized. Aparently everyone has accepted that, at least i didn't hear outcries of public rage about it, the people even expect to be lied to and think it's good business style.
I don't like it either but that's how things are now, and unless you think that a few honest scientists can fundamentally change the way the population is thinking you might go a little easier on them. The result of being honest with the future perspective of their research would probably be that funding goes to other projects headed by someone whithout any qualms to tell bold lies. Of course the system is bad and tends to bring the biggest assholes to the top (see politics where the process has worked for a longer time to see the results). I can live with a scientist that doesn't tell the whole truth (maybe by omitting the point that all those fancy products are to be expected at least 20 years from now), it's better than someone blatantly lying and just presenting works of his imagination as experimental results (yeah, that happened, everyone thought the guy was just great unless someone found the same diagram explaining totally different facts, until then there were only a few puzzled scientists who couldn't reproduce any of his research).
We need that basic science and we have to look farther into the future than the next business quarter or even the next two years. It's fine to have industrial funding, but you'll only get that for technologies that go into a marketable product in the next 3 years. We'd never have gotten semiconductor-technology if science were only dependant on such industrial funding, we'd be building better and better relay switches by now and computers would be prohibitively expensive, let alone digital watches.
It's the job of our politicians to secure our future by funding such basic science now, but those politicians fail to see anything that's beyond their term of office (see education systems worldwide). At least it's not politicians who decide which project gets funding and which doesn't, it's usually other scientists who assign parts of the total "science budget" to specific projects. Thos other scientists have quite a good grasp how long this project will take to yield any marketable results, but they know as well, that it'll probably be worth it (you never can say for sure, maybe we all get hit by a huge asteroid and should have put everything into an effort to get a foothold on mars, who can say).
I think these new materials give us a great chance for better understanding of high-temperature superconducting materials, and, hell, they found a totally new form of matter, we don't even know what we could use it for.
Re:I might also point out... (Score:3, Insightful)
That even with the so-called "pros," much of the ideas associated with quantum dynamics is theory. While some is based on real physical phenomenon (the particle/wave duality of light for example), other ideas, like the notion that there exist quantum entities that float around in spacetime (moving backward and forward in time - we notice their presence only when they happen to share the same point in spacetime that we occupy), qualify as nothing more than "the best way we can think of at the moment to explain what we see." Fortunately, a good imagination doesn't require a PhD in quantum physics.
Re:American Scientific Dominance (Score:1, Insightful)
But go ahead, feel superior, you probably need it.
Re:Too many references to superconductors (Score:4, Insightful)
Wanna talk about pointless research, I heard about these zany scientists that were looking into interactions between electicity and magnetism (like anything good could come of that). I think they were trying to make something called a "Cathode Ray". I mean, what good would that do the general public? Are we going to zap things with this mysterious "Cathode Ray" or something? It sounds like something from a bad sci-fi movie.
These people should be cut from funding... they're just waisting tax payers money. Who ever heard of a Cathode Ray anyway?
The US power distribution infrastructure... (Score:3, Insightful)
Superconductor research (especially that which works at "room temperature") could be immediately applied to this problem once refined, drastically reducing energy costs and our largest source of pollution.
The sooner, the better, I say.
Re:Name Change! (Score:1, Insightful)
After all, today they don't say "I'll blast you with my Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation gun" in SF films, but they say "I'll blast you with my LASER gun!"
Re:Sixth form of matter? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, if the patented process turns out to be the only way to physically create the new form of matter, then yes, your fears will be realized. Darn, after all that research, the scientists are the only ones allowed to profit from their discovery!