Posted on 07/25/2015 6:00:39 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
And it could be the key to understanding one of the biggest mysteries in physics today - high-temperature superconductors.
An international team of scientists has announced the discovery of a new state of matter in a material that appears to be an insulator, superconductor, metal and magnet all rolled into one, saying that it could lead to the development of more effective high-temperature superconductors.
Why is this so exciting? Well, if these properties are confirmed, this new state of matter will allow scientists to better understand why some materials have the potential to achieve superconductivity at a relativity high critical temperature (Tc) - "high" as in −135 °C as opposed to −243.2 °C. Because superconductivity allows a material to conduct electricity without resistance, which means no heat, sound, or any other form of energy release, achieving this would revolutionise how we use and produce energy, but it’s only feasible if we can achieve it at so-called high temperatures.
As Michael Byrne explains at Motherboard, when we talk about states of matter, it’s not just solids, liquids, gases, and maybe plasmas that we have to think about. We also have to consider the more obscure states that don’t occur in nature, but are rather created in the lab - Bose–Einstein condensate, degenerate matter, supersolids and superfluids, and quark-gluon plasma, for example.
By introducing rubidium into carbon-60 molecules - more commonly known as 'buckyballs' - a team led by chemist Kosmas Prassides from Tokohu University in Japan was able to change the distance between them, which forced them into a new, crystalline structure. When put through an array of tests, this structure displayed a combination of insulating, superconducting, metallic, and magnetic phases, including a brand new one, which the researchers have named 'Jahn-Teller metals'.
Named after the Jahn-Teller effect, which is used in chemistry to describe how at low pressures, the geometric arrangement of molecules and ions in an electronic state can become distorted, this new state of matter allows scientists to transform an insulator - which can’t conduct electricity - into a conductor by simply applying pressure. Byrne explains at Motherboard:
"This is what the rubidium atoms do: apply pressure. Usually when we think about adding pressure, we think in terms of squeezing something, forcing its molecules closer together by brute force. But it's possible to do the same thing chemically, tweaking the distances between molecules by adding or subtracting some sort of barrier between them - sneaking in some extra atoms, perhaps.
What happens in a Jahn-Teller metal is that as pressure is applied, and as what was previously an insulator - thanks to the electrically-distorting Jahn-Teller effect - becomes a metal, the effect persists for a while. The molecules hang on to their old shapes. So, there is an overlap of sorts, where the material still looks an awful lot like an insulator, but the electrons also manage to hop around as freely as if the material were a conductor."
And it’s this transition phase between insulator and conductor that, until now, scientists have never seen before, and hints at the possibility of transforming insulating materials into super-valuable superconducting materials. And this buckyball crystalline structure appears to be able to do it at a relatively high TC. "The relationship between the parent insulator, the normal metallic state above Tc, and the superconducting pairing mechanism is a key question in understanding all unconventional superconductors," the team writes in Science Advances.
There’s a whole lot of lab-work to be done before this discovery will mean anything for practical energy production in the real world, but that’s science for you. And it’s got people excited already, as chemist Elisabeth Nicol from the University of Guelph in Canada told Hamish Johnston at PhysicsWorld: "Understanding the mechanisms at play and how they can be manipulated to change the Tc surely will inspire the development of new [superconducting] materials".
For any magic trick or other illusion, just figure out how you would do it. Chances are that’s how the mysterious achiever did it too.
The coral castle is vaguely familiar to me, but I have often wondered how puzzling it might be to someone else if I chose to move something heavy around by simply putting a pad of ice under it. Just move it into place and then leave it alone.
How do you 'simply' put a pad of ice under a 30 ton rock ?
How do you put a wire under it?
Why would you want to ?
That was the implication; that Edward Leedskalnin had developed some method of moving stones using a combination of electricity and magnetism, or some side effect of them.
It would be fun to play with some of that stuff, but I'll never get around to it. We might discover that charging up the stones caused them to vibrate in some manner and then move the way washing machines with an unbalanced load will move. It is interesting, but it is also clear that Ancient Egyptians did not use that technique, and did not need to. They had engineers.
I suspect that most of the pyramid stones were cubical, and according to the tale I related in the poem on my about page, there was a reason for the stone to be cubical.
My expressed theory is that the stones were made into wheels by putting arc-faces of wood on them, like a strap-on wooden pallet, and then using thick ropes and teams of strong men to move the stones.
The art of the assembly came at the last turning, when the stone block would be rotated into its final rest position in precisely the right location, exactly adjacent to its neighbor with no room at all between them. Stones would have to be set several times each hour to keep up the pace, and the engineers would not only be in competition with each other, but also with their own previous records.
I don't have any idea how they got paid, but you can bet that the better job they did, the more reward they got for doing it.
Giorgio knows ...
My expressed theory is that the stones were made into wheels by putting arc-faces of wood on them, like a strap-on wooden pallet, and then using thick ropes and teams of strong men to move the stones.
A logical and possible conclusion. However, transportation is just one aspect of building the pyramids.
On the issue of Coral Castle, you and I seem to be in agreement. Neither of us has a clue how one man did all that. Twice.
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