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Posted on 03/25/2014 7:21:28 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Physicists are using surprising ideas and mathematical tools originating in string theory to guide research into strange materials that are cropping up in condensed matter laboratories...
“Let’s start here,” Sachdev says. “Condensed matter physicists study the behaviour of electrons in many materials – semiconductors, metals, and exotic materials like superconductors.”
Normally, these physicists can model the behaviour of a material as if electrons were moving freely around inside it. Even if that’s not what’s actually happening, because of complex interactions, it makes the model easy to understand and the calculations easier to do. Electrons (and occasionally other particles) used in this kind of short-hand model are called quasi-particles...
“Without quasi-particles, it’s a mess,” says William Witczak-Krempa. Witczak-Krempa, a Perimeter postdoctoral fellow, is also a condensed matter theorist who collaborated with Sachdev on the paper. “It’s this quantum fuzzball of stuff.,, Erik’s work was a huge computational achievement. It took months of processing time. And, in the end, the results still needed to be converted into a form that can be compared with experiments. This is where we tried something new.”
To perform this conversion, Sachdev and Witczak-Krempa tackled the same system from a different angle: string theory.
(Excerpt) Read more at newswise.com ...
No images, I'm just putting this text here because sometimes the system forgets to add a "reply" link.
At last, a scientist who knows how to name something strange: “It’s this quantum fuzzball of stuff ...”
Bump
Model, hell let's take it to the lab and find out for real - Not when you're seeding black holes I say! :-)
"What’s more, string theory has finally produced a set of physical predictions that experimentalists can go check. "
About time. I'm hoping it's true and it works out.
At Cern there were voices which cautioned that no one knew what would happen if they created a nano-sized black hole in a collision. But they fired that thing up anyway and even repaired it and did it again after it over heated!
Which reminds me, with the first hydrogen bomb tests the 'brilliant' scientists got a 40% higher yield than expected, because they didn't think Lithium would add any to the reactions, IIRC.
Thanks, I used to use that one in the rotation, until the URL I used vanished.
That was Ed Teller’s bomb design, I believe — the ginormous contraption we have to thank for the B-52 and the Saturn V (indirectly — the F1 engine was going to be needed to deliver the Teller H-bomb).
:’)
At least maybe it will be quick. ;)
The bar for what constitutes experiment has been lowered though. :’)
“Strange materials that are cropping up in condensed matter laboratories”
I wondered where I left my jello.
True enough. But don't overlook this key fact: Desperate times call for desperate measures.
It seems clear to me that String Theory is long overdue for something, anything that can help verify all this math. Just because your theory is pretty just isn't good enough for me. I'd like to see something that either proves or disproves the whole concept.
Worth reading:
The watchers don’t have to be so far away. It is a very good bet that humankind has been under scrutiny for generations, and particularly since our detonations in the forties, fifties and sixties. The detections may have been no further away than the Moon ... or in polar orbit (Black KNight anyone?).
That book was actually the inspiration for this ping list. :’)
They’re utilizing mathematics derived from M-Theory exploration. That’s a start, and if I recall correctly, I think there are at least two other such studies.
Something said by the late great physicist Paul Dirac has always sortta haunted me: “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”
Beauty in the sense of symmetry.
I believe that neither beauty nor truth can exist, one without the other.
Funny, isn’t it?, that these are also characteristics usually associated with God.
Something said by the late great physicist Paul Dirac has always sortta haunted me: “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”
+++++++++++
That is a really interesting comment. Being a kind person, I assume that Dirac didn’t believe that a pretty theory with pretty equations falsified by experiment had any value.
But in rejecting complex descriptions of the workings of nature I agree with his comment. Einstein didn’t sum an infinite trigonometric series to express the relationship between the speed of light, mass and energy. Somehow nature has conjured a way to express its behavior using various very simple combinations of mathematical symbols. Dirac wanted to find those symbols and the associated arrangement of those symbols that explain natural phenomena. An admiral goal.
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