If cryogenically freezing people ever becomes a popular thing, it’d be interesting to see how an audience would react to a 300 year old stand up comedian
Cryogenics don’t work. It destroys cells. It’s bullshit.
Hola mis amigos! Happy Wednesday! I hope you’re ready because today I will blow your mind!!!!! Last year I went to San Francisco for PhysCon (a physics convention) and there were quite a few speakers. One of them was Eric Cornell. He, and other members of his team, won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on the Bose-Einstein Condensate. I was able to meet Eric Cornell and that is why I decided to do today’s edition on the Bose-Einstein Condensate. And because it’s VERY cool. Let’s jump right in.
Bose-Einstein Condensate
So, obviously, by the name, the Bose-Einstein Condensate was theorized by
Satyendra Nath Bose (the person responsible for the boson) and Albert Einstein in the 1920s. During this time period, it was only a theory because they did not have the technology required to create the condensate.
So what is the Bose-Einstein condensate? This is where it gets very cool. We know from like the third grade there are three basic states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Each stage happens at a certain temperature. For example, water becomes a solid at 0 degrees C (32 F). Anything above 0 water begins to melt and become a liquid. Boiling point of water is 100 degrees C (212 F) and becomes a gas. Again, that’s elementary. In high school, we learned that there’s a fourth state of matter: plasma. This happens when ionized gases are basically super heated. It really has to do with energy within the gases but we’ll hit the “Because Physics” button for now. A common outlet of plasma is lightning bolts and stars. So… we super heat stuff and we know what happens. What if we super COOL stuff? [ENTER FIFTH STATE OF MATTER] whaaaaaat????? Yes!! I tell no lies. There is a fifth state of matter: the Bose-Einstein Condensate!
Essentially what happens is you cool gas to a hair above absolute zero. That’s extremely cold. It’s so cold, there is literally NO place in the universe which is that cold. To recap, absolute zero is the temperature at which the vibrations and movements of atoms stop. But right before absolute zero, just mere nano kelvins above, something weird happens to the atoms. As the temperature approaches absolute zero, movements starts to slow down. At that point, the atoms start to clump together. Multiple atoms begin to create one super atom. It becomes, quite literally, a big blob. It’s at this point that they start giving that wave motion. This is what is called the Bose-Einstein Condensate, the FIFTH state of matter. Conceptually, the Bose-Einstein Condensate is VERY cool (literally. LOL imma sit down now).
This is all I’ll explain for now, only because if I go into any more detail on this, it would get SO confusing and there’s so much math and we all know how I feel about hard math. Sorry there weren’t a lot of pictures for this one! Illustrations for the Bose-Einstein Condensate are very scarce but it’s pretty easy to picture when given the conceptual details.
Hope you enjoyed this Edition on a very cool subject!! Also, I wanted to thank those of you who gave me suggestions and tips on how and what to study for the chemistry portion of my Quiz Bowl team. Most of you said organic chemistry is very important and honestly, I about started crying. And no…not happy tears. But, I have to face my fear…. and learn organic chemistry!
Anyway, hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your day!
A magnet slows down on the way through the metallic pipe because of the magnetic induction Lenz’s Law
I thought this was the phenomenon where a copper (a non magnetic metal) still affects magnets?
Different metals have different magnetic effects. Iron is ferromagnetic, meaning it aligns to have the same magnetic field as a magnet affecting it (i.e, it becomes attracted to the magnet). Other non-ferromagnetic conductors gain an induced magnetic field.
The principle behind this is that a moving charge produces a magnetic field, so a loop in a conducting wire does as well, since conducting wires carry moving charges. However, a conducting wire without any current moving in it will generate its own current when a magnetic field is brought near it; but currents also generate magnetic fields! So, the original magnetic field makes a current in a wire which makes its own magnetic field.
Lenz’s Law tells us that this induced magnetic field will always oppose the change in magnetic field. So, if you bring a positive magnetic pole near a loop of wire, the wire will produce a current that generates a negative current. This effect slowly declines as the field stays there, but will in fact REVERSE if the field is taken away. Remember: it opposes the CHANGE in field. So take away the positive pole, and your induced field will go positive!
How this applies to the copper tube, is very similar! The magnet is basically making the tube induce an opposing field, which pushes up on the magnet, while gravity pushes down. This is because the tube is essentially a very wide wire. The falling magnet without a tube there would ordinarily accelerate due to gravity, but with the tube giving an opposing force, it reaches a terminal velocity that’s actually pretty slow.
The reason copper is used is because copper is an excellent conductor. This is the same principal that allows hoverboards to work over liquid nitrogen-cooled superconductors. The low resistance in the metal allows the current to flow freely, and in the case of the superconductor, the opposing field can be so strong as to oppose gravity and allow levitation!
(This was in my physics class last year I’m just very excited that I know something relevant!)
Meet SAW (or Single Actuator Wave-like robot). A bioinspired robot that can move or swim forward and backward by producing a continuously advancing wave.
people today with access to more raw information than any other period: the earth is flat
german artilleryman in 1916, who barely washes his own ass: I need to account for the curvature and rotation of the earth when plotting my firing plans
This liquid is boiling and freezing simultaneously because it’s reaching its ‘triple point,’ which is the temperature and pressure at which three phases of a substance (gas, liquid, and solid) co-exist in equilibrium. Source
You’ve gone and confused it for fucks sake
Fucked up a perfectly good chemical compound, is what you did. Look at it, it’s got anxiety.
When humans have dug into the source code and found a bug
Usually I’d say that poor thing is suffering from too much pressure but this would be a downright lie here…
ifesbob 