41–50 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.
Maybe I'm wrong or too naive... but isn't it related to "cavitation"?
Second comment for a semi-off-topic question: does the state of matter depend on the gravity? Thought-experiment: take any solid, put it in an infinitely strong cup, and crank up gravity. At some point gravity overwhelms the forces holding the substance together and thus the substance ends up breaking apart and.. filling the cup just like a liquid, no? Does everything become liquid-like at sufficiently high gravity?…
Turns out glass has been known to be a fluid and to fracture for quite some time. [edit: but glass is not a simple fluid.]
I thought glass was a solid?
> 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.
They care about rheology because that expertise enables fracking, and they're smart enough to understand that you have to fund basic science to get (valuable) applied science.
Why not funding energy transition research for instance. It’s know to science for half a century we’ll cook to death if we don’t phase out fossil fuel energy.
And by know, I mean there’s literally millions of papers on the topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought glass was a solid?
I lived in a house built around 1605 in the Netherlands, with some of the windows being hundreds of years old, based on expert opinion. The glass had started to droop downward in certain places, almost like the resin you see in trees. It made me realize that glass is not as rigid as I thought.
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.
Society flourished without lots of stuff we have today. It just flourished less. 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.…
Hopefully this will get us recycling friendly plastics for foods in the long run since those just get burned nowadays cause you can’t recycle those we have today for that job.
Second comment for a semi-off-topic question: does the state of matter depend on the gravity? Thought-experiment: take any solid, put it in an infinitely strong cup, and crank up gravity. At some point gravity overwhelms the forces holding the substance together and thus the substance ends up breaking apart and.. filling the cup just like a liquid, no? Does everything become liquid-like at sufficiently high gravity?…
If you put a cup of water in a strong enough gravity, lower part of the cup will have higher pressure, and that part will turn to unusual ice types. While top of the cup will remain liquid. Cranking up a gravity will only change the ratio. This is why people use pressure instead of gravity, pressure is what defines the state.
Your main point is something like "material becomes weak compared to gravity, conforms to the cup, as if liquid", or "cant have long range structure". But we already have solids that are like that - sand. Sand doesnt resist change to its shape, it just slides in a new position. And yet we still consider sand to be solid. Angle of a pile in particular.
Even a neutron star likely has surface level irregularities on a scale of centimiters. While a liquid can flow to submicron level smoothness even in a diy experiment.
Material gets stronger as pressure is increased. Unusual crystal structure becomes available. Superconductors and some other weird properties can exist only when crystal structure is compressed. And this tendency continues all the way to degenerate matter, as in neutron stars. Material from inside of a neutron star is likely the strongest a material can be in this universe.
So in the end, "solidness" continues to fight back, presenting enough properties to differentiate it from a true liquid, even if it could look somewhat similar, "shallow pile of material", all the way to degenerate matter of neutron stars.
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?
Your intuition is correct, and what you’re describing is cavitation - which the article goes on to mumble about a little. Honestly, I am also struggling to see what the novel result here is. You can snap off a drip of pitch by pulling on it - if you shear it, it will probably just bend - yank on the droplet and it comes off with a satisfying snap. But then again I suppose if you lead a cosseted life, never played wit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Oh yes, they had some of the best climate scientists back then. It’s somewhat a scale up of what the tobacco industry did, same strategies, etc
of what the tobacco industry did
> 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.