Marble and Sand Creates a New State of Matter

An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience has a story about a surprisingly simple experiment (yes, you can try this at home) at room temperature that yielded a jet of sand that behaves similar to jets created in ultra-dense gas near absolute zero. From the article: 'We're discovering a new type of fluid state that seems to exist in this combination of gas--air in this case--and a dense arrangement of particles.'"

Mmm... Mand...

[Aquatopia17]

I'll get it out of the way and declare this new state of matter Mand! Because Sarble would just be stupid sounding. Really.

Re:Mmm... Mand...

[mnmn]

That explains those Mand Space Stations we have up there. Old News. Dupe.

Re:Not very impressive

[whitehatlurker]

Who is to say if this is worthwhile or not at this point? I think it's rather neat.

Re:Not very impressive

[MindStalker]

But this is the essence of phyics. Observation of things that don't make sense, and figuring out how it happends to create new physics models.

Re:Not very impressive

[dangerweasel]

I believe a lot of the subatomic particles that people study in particle accelerators last a lot less than a millisecond. Are those useless as well? I think the corn starch and water thing is cool too, but I think muons, gluon and quarks are are going to have a much more important scientific function.

way to go

[cyberbob2010]

...another dupe lol

The result looks like a simple sine wave to me...

[bergeron76]

The resultant sand looks like a simple sine wave to me. The two differing images appear to have a different "frequency" to the wave.

The thing they discovered here, is that "fields" don't just occur in the 2 dimensions that we normally see. These fields, magnetic; etc. occur in more than 2 dimensions.

Basically, picture a sinewave (of any wavelength/amplitude), and offset it slightly on a new plane behind it, and continue that in both directions.

A new phenomenon is about to be discovered that will make the

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The result looks like a simple sine wave to me.

[Pikapp]

It's not that the resulting wave acts in a novel manner, what is suprising is the column of matter that shoots up afterwards (the jet). Quick and Dirty Summary of the aricle: As you increase ambient pressure on a losely packed cluster of particles you would expect the pressure response from a force to be lessened, resulting in a smaller jet. Instead the high pressure in-between the particles seems to act as a turbocharger, creating a larger force - evidenced by the much higher jet.

Re:The result looks like a simple sine wave to me.

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'm surprised how surprised they were. Whenever you create an 'hole' in the atmosphere where atmosphere suddenly rushes in, the results are pretty impressive.

Surely they crush beer cans with the atmosphere in their spare time like any good scientist?

That is not the result you're looking for...

[TigerNut]

The ring of ejected particles you're talking about is pretty much the expected result for any object impact. Those particles follow a roughly parabolic trajectory (which is what you're describing as a 'sine wave'), due to gravity. The unexpected result and the discovery have to do with the vertical jet that is visible in the center of the third frame (top and bottom), and not anything to do with the outer ring of material.

Its good to see basic science supported again

[ElitistWhiner]

I like it when unexpected things happen and science can't explain it. Status quo is upset and knowledge gets a chance to reorder thinking. Now that bit in the experiment where the *jet* behaves in well defined boundaries informs us that there is more than meets the eye! This is the part of Science where it is challenged by its dictum of "observable" facts.

So how long is the Discipline going to be constrained by the human eye? How much experimental information is lost in the reduction to an observable medium?

Re:Its good to see basic science supported again

[falzer]

> So how long is the Discipline going to be constrained by the human eye?

It isn't.

This may be new to slashdot

[arodland]

But it certainly isn't new. I'm quite sure that I read about it at least a year ago. "New state of matter" is a bit of a stretch; it's more that "heavy particle gases" are enough unlike ideal gases that they do some relatively interesting things. As I understand it, the point of studying them is to gain a better understanding of more mundane gases in interesting situations like turbulent flow.

Also, I seem to remember that some years back there was an experiment done on the space shuttle involving a mess of ball bearings in microgravity that was also intended to study the same thing.

Re:This may be new to slashdot

[Gogo Dodo]

You didn't read the article very carefully...

Though announced yesterday, the phenomenon was first noted in 2001 in work by Sigurdur Thoroddsen and Amy Shen, who were then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It's a little bit ironic...

[MHZmaster]

Is it a coincidence that the last post was "from the powdered-water dept."?
That seems to describe this phenomenon pretty accurately!

Could it be a conspiracy?