DailyDirt: Materials Behaving Weirdly
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Materials used to be so important that several stages of history are marked by them: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, etc… Nowadays history seems a bit less intrigued by the materials we have access to. There’s no Superconducting Cuprates Age, for instance. But there are still some really interesting discoveries that could not have been made without various material properties at our disposal. Here are just a few examples.
- Some superconducting materials may point to the existence of another phase of matter. This new phase of matter hasn’t been completely defined, but it may be critical to understanding how superconductivity can be sustained at higher temperatures. [url]
- A new transition temperature for all liquids has been discovered and dubbed the “dynamic crossover temperature” — which doesn’t seem as catchy as the glass transition temperature. But it might become more important if some practical applications for it are also found… [url]
- Scientists have observed some molecules exhibiting superfluidity for the first time. Actually, the hydrogen molecules were only 85% superfluid… call me when they get 100% of them. [url]
- Metamaterials can reproduce a few aspects of spacetime, and now they’ve been used to recreate a mini-BigBang, demonstrating that time travel shouldn’t be possible. Too bad for John Connor, and good news for the machines. [url]
- To discover more interesting chemistry-related articles, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Filed Under: metamaterials, superconductors, superfluids
Comments on “DailyDirt: Materials Behaving Weirdly”
“Too bad for John Connor, and good news for the machines.”
Isn’t it the opposite? The machines couldn’t kill John Connor in their present, so they sent a terminator into the past to kill his young self.
Re: Re:
But… if time travel wasn’t possible, then John Connor would never have been born, right?
“Too bad for John Connor, and good news for the machines.”
Isn’t it the opposite? The machines couldn’t kill John Connor in their present, so they sent a terminator into the past to kill his young self.
yeah the whole point of the terminator films was that the machines did themselves in with human’s help thanks to a time loop where the machines wanted to kill john because he was born because they went back in time. When you really think about it it makes 0 sense.
Unless of course there are additional timelines in which a different human leader was born and was saving humanity from the machines and they went back to kill him which accidentally created the john conner time loop where john turned out to be the leader.
It all boils down to the “multiverse” theory” being a big ol’ crock. Time is merely our perception of the movement of objects etc. it is as impossible to go back in time as it is to move every single atom and particle in the entire universe back into those positions. The “space-time” continuum and all this nonsense would be sheer nonsense to the physicists that came up with the basic framework.
See the wiki on “time” for more information about how time travel was smacked down decades or centuries ago but sci fi writers never got the memo.