Scientists Finally Turn Hydrogen Into a Metal, Ending a 80-Year Quest (arstechnica.com) 334
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.
Now can we (Score:2)
Use it to power our cellphones?
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Forget the cell phone, I'm ready for some transparent aluminum or plasteel.
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You do realize that every time scientists mess with hydrogen things tend to go boom? These hairless apes just made another way to blow things up.
Re: Now can we (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Now can we (Score:4, Interesting)
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The densities and measurements they give show that the hydrogen in the metallic state they created is only about 10 times denser than other forms of solid hydrogen that have been around a long time and two orders of magnitude lower density than what NIF achieves at much higher temperatures. Your reaction rate drops to effectively zero (less than 0.1 reactions per second for a cubic meter of the stuff) at 1 million Kelvin for such a density for a mixture of deuterium and tritium, and is even slower for just
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Re: Now can we (Score:2, Funny)
Big Bada boom.
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My only question is: At what point do the protons fuse into one nucleus to form some rather delightful helium-2? I presume that is the motivation for all this of course, so that we can make some killer party balloons.
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Re: Now can we (Score:2, Informative)
Number of protons determines the element. "The nucleus of deuterium, called a deuteron, contains one proton and one neutron, whereas the far more common hydrogen isotope, protium, has no neutron in the nucleus."
Re: Now can we (Score:5, Funny)
when you combine two protons, and convert one to a neutron via election capture, how many protons do you have left?
If you're dealing with election capture you have zero protons but at least one Trump.
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yeah, but it wasn't obvious that he was talking about proton->neutron conversion at first glance. It does make sense, hydrogen->helium has to pick up neutrons from somewhere, but it's not a step that most people think about a lot :)
Re:Now can we (Score:5, Informative)
It's just in the past couple of years that they've developed a method to make large sheets of it.
Re:Now can we (Score:5, Informative)
Aluminium oxynitride [wikipedia.org]
Pics [google.com] cuz it happened.
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Calling Aluminum Oxynitride, or Aluminum Oxide "transparent aluminum" is like calling glass or quartz "transparent silicon" just because its chemical makeup is silicon dioxide. Some people do like to call things "transparent aluminum" just because it sounds futuristic, even though it makes no sense to do so.
The compounds Aluminum Oxide/Oxynitride share essentially no mechanical, chemical, optical, or electrical properties with elemental aluminum, so calling it "transparent aluminum" is, well.... wrong. The
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Wrong. Aluminium is a metal, ruby and sapphire are salts.
Re:Now can we (Score:5, Informative)
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Some oxides are not salts, metal oxides generally are, though.
Ehh, no. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ehh, no. (Score:4, Informative)
Metal is a state of matter, not a category of elements.
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Actually, not so much. https://www.reference.com/scie... [reference.com]
However, if "metal"ness was entirely a matter of which element is present, then hydrogen would either be a metal or not, and metallic hydrogen would be either impossible or uninteresting.
Re:Ehh, no. (Score:5, Informative)
Carbon is a metal.
No it ain't. It is sometimes considered a metalloid, but I've never heard it considered to be a metal.
it is opaque
Er, well, diamond isn't, nor is lonsdaleite.
and shiny
Graphite is only a bit. Fullerenes certainly aren't. Diamond is, as is glassy carbon and londsdaleite.
Are you going to claim that diamond is not a metal
Yes. Elements can be both metals and nonmetals. Tin for example is usually a metal, with all the expected properties (shiny, condctive of heat and electricity, ductile), but if the tin pest strikes you end up with nonmetallic tin which is dull, brittle and insulating.
Very few things in science fit into nearly deeined boxes. Metallicness is one of those.
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Re:Now can we (Score:4, Interesting)
At the moment it's not even known if metallic hydrogen can exist without such pressures. It's possible it will remain as a solid - which would be a solid with some really exotic and useful properties. Or, more disappointingly, it will more likely just sublime back into plain old hydrogen gas.
Re:Now can we (Score:5, Interesting)
Use it to power our cellphones?
Unlikely. But metallic hydrogen may have some very useful properties. It has been theorized to be a room temp superconductor. According to TFA, they haven't been able to test that yet.
Another factoid about SMH: It is believed to make up much of the mass of Jupiter, with Jovian SMH possibly making up the mass of a few dozen earths.
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I know jupiter is under a lot of pressure, but is it really up to 495 gigapascals?
I looked that up, and apparently the core can get up to maybe 4,500 gigapascals, which is high enough, but they'll still have to rewrite the estimates of what the layers are, since they think it transitioned to metallic at about 200 gigapascals, which we now know isn't even half the required pressure.
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Re:Now can we (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it now.
"Gentlemen, I present to you a room temperature superconductor!"
...
"What? No one said anything about ambient pressure."
Re:Now can we (Score:4, Funny)
Researchers in Fairbanks, Alaska announced last week that they have discovered a room temperature superconductor.
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Because metal ya nerd. \\m//
Waiting for the alien spacecraft (Score:2)
/ particular pet peeve of mine
Re:Waiting for the alien spacecraft (Score:5, Funny)
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This is the process to make metallic hydrogen, it does not mean that the stuff requires the same pressure to stay in the metallic state.
It's Hydrogen. Yes it does.
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does not mean that the stuff requires the same pressure to stay in the metallic state.
It's Hydrogen. Yes it does.
You don't know that. There are many examples of substances that retain their properties when pressure is released. For instance, there is Ice-9 [wikipedia.org].
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Re:Waiting for the alien spacecraft (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Waiting for the alien spacecraft (Score:5, Informative)
No faith required.
Hey, they've believed hydrogen would become metallic when exposed to enough pressure. It took a long time to test it, but guess what, it does! At around 495 gigapascals, a pressure we hadn't been able to do until just recently.
This was done 20 years ago... (Score:3, Informative)
Done 20 years ago in a gas gun:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/26/science/big-gun-makes-hydrogen-into-a-metal.html
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Re:This was done 20 years ago... (Score:4, Informative)
Done 20 years ago in a gas gun:
No it wasn't. It was believed to at the time, but it was a very difficult experiment and the results were not considered entirely conclusive.
Awesome story (Score:5, Insightful)
More stories like this one please!
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Transition backwards at negative pressure? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 ?
I've wondered about this for years (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Hydrogen was first solidified in 1899. It wasn't a metal.
But it was metal 80 years ago! (Score:4, Funny)
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. ;)
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But the greater challenge still exists... (Score:2, Interesting)
... and that, as we all know... is transparent aluminum.
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Possibilities.... (Score:2)
Extreme bling just got a lot lighter!!!!
Pictures (Score:5, Informative)
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... [thenews.com.pk]
Spokesman for hydrogen (Score:5, Funny)
A spokesman for hydrogen said earlier - "There. HAPPY NOW?"
The photo on that article! (Score:2)
That is the best thing ever happened to me. Love you, Ars Technica.
Prematurely Optimistic? (Score:3)
Skepticism over claim of metallic hydrogen (Score:3)
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 [nature.com]:
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.
Re: Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fundamental research is never fruitless.
Re: Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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Room temperature superconductors could cause a jump of orders of magnitude in capability across a wide range of technologies.
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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.
Re:Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re: Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:3)
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 co
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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 potential
Re:Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's Wikipedia's take [wikipedia.org] 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]
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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 be
Re:Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] predates the telescope by over 2,000 years and had a huge impact on human civilization.
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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.
Barry Allen would pay money for this technology (Score:3)
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!
Capsule corp. (Score:2)
Re:Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sure, when you keep doing them poorly (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything we step back and debate problems more than necessary. You can easily spend a career in physics identifying a single "difficulty" and putting together a plan for the next generation to tackle it.
I'm a third generation nanotechnologist. The guys 40+ years ago mapped out what they thought could be done (they were horribly wrong, but they were good guesses), and they developed the laboratory tools we needed just to look at the stuff (that didn't exist yet). This was hard, some of them won Nobel prizes for their work. The guys 20-30 years ago got some of the proof of concept work done by inventing new materials (in the end, not the right materials, but very close). This was also hard; some of them won Nobel prizes. I got to work on the very first applications with the right tools and the right materials. This was a lot easier; none of my generation is going to win anything. The people I trained get to do engineering and work on products. They can do in a day what took me a year, and what my mentor could just write about theoretically.
Still, we're very far away from the end of the road.
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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.
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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 r
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Re:Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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
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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.
Re:Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Gah! If that's really the main thing that drives the economy we will soon be completely and utterly fucked.
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Subtle.
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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.
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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 si
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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
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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
Re:Can someone explain in laymans terms how.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Recommendation well received. [youtube.com]
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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.
Re:Key Feature (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither of these are metals.
i agree. But the article states: "the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals".
The article does not state: "the sample turned reflective, a key feature unique to metals"
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Water is a horrible reflector, only reflecting ~5% at normal incidence, as does anything else with an index of refraction around 1-2. Also, just about any smooth material is reflective at shallow angles. This both comes from Fresnel equations. To get anything close to a metal-like reflectivity of >50% at normal incidence requires a very large real component to the index of refraction.