111–120 of 158 posts
If you sent a sample of carbon nanotubes to the 1950’s, they’d say “this is carbon”. That doesn’t mean the sample wasn’t exotic to them and hard for them to reproduce or understand.
An “alien material” or “alien alloy” would be one where we just didn’t understand how it’s made, even if we can see perfectly how it’s structured and what it consists of.
But it would need to be based on a different structure than atoms, so not some new element or alloy but something completely different. Say some hard matter based on some condensed unknown field.
This sounds highly unprobable. But if true, this would have implications about all of physics, not just some new material science.
As a former scientist well practiced in x-ray diffraction it has been really fun watching these blatant flasehoods spread. We have mastered identifying the atomic structure of materials. Sadly spreading these claims is how these programs self propegate. Luckily they don't do much real damage other than misleading the public and wasting government funding.
You don't think a civilization with sufficiently advanced nanotech could fabricate a material that would flummox x-ray diffraction? That seems a bit short-sighted to me. Our imaging and composition technologies are not sufficiently advanced to determine exact structures of anything - we still have to include many assumptions in order for the data to make sense. For x-ray diffraction in particular, we assume all mater…
This sounds like pure sci-fi to me. AFAIK, everything we know about physics suggests that there are no stable substances made up of sub-atomic particles in a way that "skips the atom part". If that were possible, it would be in the realm of "entirely new physics".
Not to say that it's not possible of course... you don't know what you don't know and all that. But the Standard Model seems to be pretty firmly grounded and I haven't seen anything to suggest that it allows for such a thing. Personally, my bayesian prior on this being possible would be awfully close to 0 right now.
Then again, maybe it's Dwarf Star Alloy.[1]
[1]: tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Dwarf_star_alloy
I totally buy it that there is no such thing as an "unidentifiable alloy." I also buy it that journalists, not being materials scientists or indeed scientists of any sort, do not know the difference between an "alloy" and "a hunk of some hard material," so at some point they wrote down "alloy" because the word sounds exotic, like something you'd find at Area 51. This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get s…
It's as if somebody had been quoted saying "The UFO appeared to be surrounded by some type of brightly glowing plasma" and Scientific American were to go get the opinions of plasma physicists about whether or not this was possible with plasma.
What the material scientists are saying is that there are techniques which would allow them to identify any physical material given that our understanding of the way that they universe works is approximately correct. If a material was discovered that was unidentifiable the government would not be putting it in a warehouse, anywhere, it would be in a massive secret lab. All the people who SA interviewed would have been co-opted into joining said lab. Undergraduate education in Physics and Chemistry in the US would be grinding to a halt, NIST grants and DARPA grants would be zero for any other topic, publication and patent rates would be falling precipitously.
Why? Because such a find would be "all bets are off" everything would be up for grabs, not only would every scientist be scrambling to be involved - all the others would be encased in dark depression knowing that what they were up to was essentially worthless.
There would be questions in the UN, threats of violence against the US, allies would be sending worried missions and publicly begging for inclusion (unless they were included in which case they would be mouth shut deferential and smug in company..)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite simply, x-ray diffraction tells you the distribution of electrons in the unit cell of the alloy. So you just put an sample into your spectrometer and it will print out the chemical elements and how they are assembled. And even if there is another island of stability of super heavy elements or something like that, it will still just tell you the charge of the nucleus. So this side of quite literally magic, as in…
We already know for a fact that there are units of matter smaller than protons/neutrons/electrons. As such, x-ray diffraction is obviously not sufficient to analyze all matter.
Yes, and everything we know about them suggests that they either:
Decay almost immediately when encountered in the wild
Immediately clump together with other particles to form larger units
Do not interact with normal matter
Etc.
IOW, there's little or no reason to think that any kind of stable material, anything that you could store in a warehouse as a clump of "stuff", is made without atoms.
If it is possible, as far as I know, that would be deep into "entirely new physics that violates a lot of central tenets of our current thinking". So yeah, that could happen, but you have to ask "is it likely"?
I’m not sure what the initial claim was about this material, but it could be “exotic” even if it is identifiable. If you sent a sample of carbon nanotubes to the 1950’s, they’d say “this is carbon”. That doesn’t mean the sample wasn’t exotic to them and hard for them to reproduce or understand. An “alien material” or “alien alloy” would be one where we just didn’t understand how it’s made, even if we can see perfectl…
Then you'd get the "so how do we make them long enough to use and have a reliable process that costs in" discussion, and I think that you'd be there for about 70 years. Sadly, maybe longer...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if there are no electrons, because there are no atoms? The suggestion that all these alleged weird alien materials are “alloys” is just a placeholder for “looks and acts metallic, therefore made of metals.” But if we happened to be dealing with real alien tech, that’s a naive and unscientific assumption. We already have people thinking about how to build programmable matter with variable properties, and it’s a f…
Assume for a second this is real alien tech. No atoms, programmable matter, literal magic, whatever. Why would this be in a warehouse of a $22 million (i.e. super small potatoes) government project? It would be the biggest budget and highest secrecy project on the books.
Also people posting on hacke
As usual, the claim that #2 could possibly be due to pilots misinterpreting visual evidence is tossed out as a hand wavy excuse despite the fact that the cases investigated by the Pentagon are (allegedly) corroborated by targeting systems, radar and satellite images, and possibly more evidence not disclosed. The entire point of the revelations was that after bringing to bear the entire analytical arsenal of the Penta…
The problem is there is zero evidence of their credibility. Essentially it's an appeal to authority argument. And the video itself doesn't show anything of the claimed behavior. No hovering over the ocean, no super fast motion, just a blob or smudge superimposed over a cloudy background as video pans around.
I totally buy it that there is no such thing as an "unidentifiable alloy." I also buy it that journalists, not being materials scientists or indeed scientists of any sort, do not know the difference between an "alloy" and "a hunk of some hard material," so at some point they wrote down "alloy" because the word sounds exotic, like something you'd find at Area 51. This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get s…
There are other thermal, gravitational, and energetic environments in the universe that we probably haven't even begun to understand.
We are still learning how the universe appears to work.
What kind of scientist can draw a conclusion without having conducted any sort of observation? That kind of closed-mindedness is totally damning to human understanding.
I totally buy it that there is no such thing as an "unidentifiable alloy." I also buy it that journalists, not being materials scientists or indeed scientists of any sort, do not know the difference between an "alloy" and "a hunk of some hard material," so at some point they wrote down "alloy" because the word sounds exotic, like something you'd find at Area 51. This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get s…
> a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how A lot stranger things have been found hidden in Vegas buildings than alien artifacts. Just a few weeks ago it started raining cheerleader uniforms in downtown Las Vegas because a demolition crew pulling down a hotel hit a sealed-off room filled with thousands of them.