Does anyone have any idea how a person could go about trying to understand the basics of what's going on here, even in just a hand wavey way? This is so far above my head it seems like magic.
Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
41–50 of 94 posts
Re: Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
#42I was reading a book hoping to work out how to derive E=mc2. My idea was to go from being about 400 years behind science to merely being 100 years behind. This sort of reporting makes me realise those 100 years are not linear. I had to go check that this was real - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-023-01300-3 , because it could have as easily been a marketing site for the next Marvel movie for all I could groun…
I'm not sure I really "get" the 400 year old physics. Things like the Lagrangian, Lagrangian transform, and the principle of least action and the Hamiltonian. I understand them on a superficial level and I know very well how to use them, but I just don't really get it. Why can we even write equations for this stuff. I have a degree in physics which makes it all the more depressing.
Alexandre Koyré has written a book and a lot of articles about it (well-known are the Copernician and Gallilean moments), and it made me mostly realize how different their thinking could be.
His works are sometimes hard to read because of the mathematics involved but also the extensive quoting in Italian, Latin, Greek etc (though with Google Lens it shouldn't be a problem in 2023).
Re: Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
#43I was reading a book hoping to work out how to derive E=mc2. My idea was to go from being about 400 years behind science to merely being 100 years behind. This sort of reporting makes me realise those 100 years are not linear. I had to go check that this was real - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-023-01300-3 , because it could have as easily been a marketing site for the next Marvel movie for all I could groun…
That's "just" special relativity. I would suggest to see it exposed in current textbooks.
Spoiler: E=m_rest c2 + E_kinetic unless you redefine the mass as a function of velocity. Something that people used to do a century ago but is unusual to it nowadays
Re: Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is really a bad idea to study anything. Actually this is what sets aside naïve hobbyist interested in Physics vs someone studying Physics systematically and efficiently as part of PhD program. I did this mistake repeatedly. I started with annotated version of Newton's Principia, spent about a year just pulling my hair and gave up to realize how much time I had lost in all kind of minutia, noise and random things…
On the other hand, some of Darwin's original treatise - Origin of species of species in particular, is well worth a read.
Maybe I got a bad translation but that was completely unreadable to me.
Re: Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
#45A factor of 1e11, while large, is commonly found in chemistry where most phenomena have a log relationship. The standard pH scale, for example, already spans 14 orders of magnitude.
Re: Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
#46I was reading a book hoping to work out how to derive E=mc2. My idea was to go from being about 400 years behind science to merely being 100 years behind. This sort of reporting makes me realise those 100 years are not linear. I had to go check that this was real - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-023-01300-3 , because it could have as easily been a marketing site for the next Marvel movie for all I could groun…
This is really a bad idea to study anything. Actually this is what sets aside naïve hobbyist interested in Physics vs someone studying Physics systematically and efficiently as part of PhD program. I did this mistake repeatedly. I started with annotated version of Newton's Principia, spent about a year just pulling my hair and gave up to realize how much time I had lost in all kind of minutia, noise and random things…
That's what the shoulders of giants are for. No need to grow your own beanstalk.
Re: Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
#47They’ve discovered Administratium! https://www.mit.edu/people/dmredish/wwwMLRF/links/Humor/Admi...
>According to the discoverers, a minute amount of administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.
There are 86k seconds in a day. 345 600 seconds in 4 days.
This quantum-slowing effect reduces the speed by 100 000 000 000.
Administratium is about as close to the actual speed of the reaction as it is to the slowed-speed reaction.
Re: Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
#48They’ve discovered Administratium! https://www.mit.edu/people/dmredish/wwwMLRF/links/Humor/Admi...
>According to the discoverers, a minute amount of administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second. There are 86k seconds in a day. 345 600 seconds in 4 days. This quantum-slowing effect reduces the speed by 100 000 000 000. Administratium is about as close to the actual speed of the reaction as it is to the slowed-speed reaction.
I think you might have miscompared to a day instead of a second? Unless I missed something. But you're right that if we were to be observing the administratium reaction over one millisecond in the slowed scenario, it would take 2.73 nanoseconds at full speed, nothing like femtoscale.
Re: Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
>According to the discoverers, a minute amount of administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second. There are 86k seconds in a day. 345 600 seconds in 4 days. This quantum-slowing effect reduces the speed by 100 000 000 000. Administratium is about as close to the actual speed of the reaction as it is to the slowed-speed reaction.
I think you might have miscompared to a day instead of a second? Unless I missed something. But you're right that if we were to be observing the administratium reaction over one millisecond in the slowed scenario, it would take 2.73 nanoseconds at full speed, nothing like femtoscale.
> ...administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.
Let x = administartium slowdown effect = 4 days / 1 second
x = 4 days * 24 hours / day
x = 96 hours * 60 minutes / hour
x = 5760 minutes * 60 seconds / minute
x = 345600 seconds
Wrote this out to also convince myself, I am 35, did physics for 3 years in undergrad, and am apparently still bamboozled by orders of magnitude regularly. Completely unintuitive!
In fact, lemme do it in reverse, I'm shocked.
Given x = slowdown factor = 100B = 100_000_000_000
x = 100_000_000_000 seconds / (60 seconds / minute)
x = 1_666_666_666 / (60 minutes / hour)
x = 27_777_777 hours / 24 hours / day
x = 1_157_407 days / 365 days / year
x = 3,170 years!
Re: Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
#50A factor of 1e11, while large, is commonly found in chemistry where most phenomena have a log relationship. The standard pH scale, for example, already spans 14 orders of magnitude.
I think there is a key difference in magnitudes of ion concentration vs time. At this scale, a faster detector seems to be comparatively less trivial than a more sensitive one.