31–40 of 68 posts
Someone tell me the industries that are going to benefit the most from this in the short and long term and what I can expect to see in the next 30 years as a result of this discovery.
You made an account to say that?
> a project in collaboration with the oil and gas company Exxon Mobil I find it a bit dark that, at a time people, crops, forests and biomes are dying due to extreme heat caused by the fossil fuel industry’s reckless behaviour the last 50 years, the said fossil fuel industry funds research on exotic rheology.
well unless you figure out how to replace plastic..
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Nope, lots of fluids that just flow over such a long period they appear solid.
That’s a misconception. Glass does not flow over time; it is a rigid, amorphous solid. The uneven thickness seen in old cathedral windows is a result of historical manufacturing. Glass was spun into discs that naturally became thicker at the edges, and builders installed the heavier side at the bottom for stability. Physicists calculate that it would take longer than the age of the universe for room-temperature windo…
so then it does flow over time, just not on a scale where it matters to us.
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That sounds like a lot of work for someone to go do for a quanta article about something neat a researcher noticed.
I worry that this sort of request will become the norm in the age of AI where people forget that people aren’t there to serve them.
I must be missing something. If something is a fluid... or at least a liquid... that means it... flows, right? Flow speed isn't infinite, so whenever you pull apart a liquid, you'll see some remnant of the pre-flow state. The thicker the liquid, the slower you need to pull it apart to see that. Is this surprising? Why wouldn't every liquid do this? In what way is this somehow special to some liquids and not others?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
well unless you figure out how to replace plastic..
We could replace a large number of plastics right now and be just fine. Society flourished and thrived before we used plastic for everything in our lives. Some people would make less profit though, so of course it's impossible to make those kinds of changes, but we could.
> a project in collaboration with the oil and gas company Exxon Mobil I find it a bit dark that, at a time people, crops, forests and biomes are dying due to extreme heat caused by the fossil fuel industry’s reckless behaviour the last 50 years, the said fossil fuel industry funds research on exotic rheology.
This is the same company whose research funding was among the first to produce forecasts of these affects. Yet that didn't stop them. Can't get more "dark" than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
It’s somewhat a scale up of what the tobacco industry did, same strategies, etc
I must be missing something. If something is a fluid... or at least a liquid... that means it... flows, right? Flow speed isn't infinite, so whenever you pull apart a liquid, you'll see some remnant of the pre-flow state. The thicker the liquid, the slower you need to pull it apart to see that. Is this surprising? Why wouldn't every liquid do this? In what way is this somehow special to some liquids and not others?
But then again I suppose if you lead a cosseted life, never played with the contents of a shed, and had your first practical experience of actual hands on behaviour of viscous liquids in a lab… you might shout “Eureka”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
well unless you figure out how to replace plastic..
We could replace a large number of plastics right now and be just fine. Society flourished and thrived before we used plastic for everything in our lives. Some people would make less profit though, so of course it's impossible to make those kinds of changes, but we could.
And people aren’t failing to migrate away from plastic because “somebody would make less money”, they’re using plastic because everything else basically sucks in comparison. It’s tough, cheap, light, stable, easy to shape, doesn’t often break dangerously, can have all of its basic properties modified, and more. Nothing else is THAT good.
Edit: Not to mention, it’s not as simple as “don’t use plastic packaging anymore”. We pull oil into a machine and cook it off at various stages to produce various things. Turning cooking stage 8 of 12 into a worthless pile of garbage to be discarded doesn’t stop us from pulling in that oil for the other 11 uses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could replace a large number of plastics right now and be just fine. Society flourished and thrived before we used plastic for everything in our lives. Some people would make less profit though, so of course it's impossible to make those kinds of changes, but we could.
Well, the mainstream adoption of plastics following World War II happens to coincide with an unprecedented period of relative global stability known as the “Long Peace.” So there’s at least some version of “thriving” that was, in fact, not previously achieved. Correlation does not imply causation but in this case it’s difficult to disentangle which innovations have lead to the relative global prosperity that has enab…
