hckrnws
I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert
(medium.com)
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by vi_sextus_vi
by vi_sextus_vi
I think it's sort of a big consensus with people that have never been involved in science work, in Chile, that science is sort of a "lazy-man" type of work. Chilean universities put a lot of emphasis in foundational science research. It should be the industry, in my opinion, that helps bridge the gaps between foundational research and applied science. But the major industries in Chile don't need to do that, why put money into R&D when you can already be a billion-dollar industry by exporting rocks. Chile's main export is not actually copper, it's rocks that have copper in them. We (I'm Chilean) export the rocks and buy back the copper cables.
Recently the newly elected president criticized foundational research saying it doesn't "turn into jobs" and instead "ends up in an expensive book abandoned in a library". It really reminded me of my friend's words, it's the attitude of someone that doesn't understand the importance of foundational science.
This research is interesting, although the article is quite technical, and I'm very happy to see the involvement of Chilean scientists in it.
Is it because there's not the energy capacity to run smelters? I thought Chili had a pretty abundant energy grid (mostly hydro as I recall).
I am only slightly relieved that HN have bubbled up a conversation about the self-reinforcing north-south divide in "cultural wealth" instead of making it even more exploitative than it was
Your friend's contribution to the cultural wealth of Chile is ironic. Maybe (some) Southies now have a better (non-fungible/modular) understanding of precision machining, gun-metallurgy or even biochemistry compared to their NorAm counterparts because of his actions.
Interesting. Do Japanese, and now Dutch, planners think they are free of the resource blessing?
[4] Alssadek, Marwan; Benhin, James (2023). "Natural resource curse: A literature survey and comparative assessment of regional groupings of oil-rich countries".
>For instance, the oil sector frequently requires technical solutions to improve offshore oil drilling. This might create positive knowledge externalities to support other sectors. If these sectors trade with the oil boom sector in the economy, then learning-by-doing spill-overs in the overall economy are expected. In this scenario, the implications of the Dutch disease would not be evident, and natural resources may in fact be a blessing rather than a curse.
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Guess what the other far right president of the region says (Argentina's). Makes me sad.
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I’m very excited to see so much engagement here, and I just wanted to share a few updates and thoughts.
The first is that The Department of Energy recently recognized my thesis work as proving the quantum spin liquid state in Zn-Barlowite, which represents a major scientific breakthrough (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aaron-breidenbach-65363b133_l...) . Certainly, there’s still plenty of doubters in the condensed matter physics community, but I’m quite proud of this recognition.
The second thing I’d like to mention is that I got approved to do both of the measurements I suggested in this article at National labs (Argonne and Oak Ridge). These are to investigate the consequences of the higher purity of the natural crystals. If successful, many of my colleagues have said that this would represent a major breakthrough in our understanding of these materials. I’m quite excited for this!!
Unfortunately, in spite of all this, I’m out of a job and broke . I’m hoping that this will change soon, but academia can be a very tough and political environment… I’ll leave it at this for now. If anyone knows an angel investor or person that writes drop science grants that might be willing to help support me while I run my experiments, please contact me at abreidenbach@alumni.stanford.edu .
Thank you for listening!
Dr Breidenbach
[1] https://medium.com/@breid.at/seizures-crystals-psychedelics-...
I like one of the introductory sentences where he says, "I am a strange person who has had a strange life, even relative to that of my strange and high achieving peers here."
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It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.
Most famous example was Louis XIV who created medals specifically to preserve French history for future archaeologists.
At that time they realized that they knew almost everything about Romans and Greek through preserved medals.
So the King created a vast medal series (Histoire Métallique) intended to outlast paper, books, and buildings.
These bronze and gold medals were intentionally buried in the foundations of monuments like the Louvre, specifically waiting for future generations to excavate them.
So the key is: durable materials, widely spread.
At least the author has time to secure property rights and buy out old mines.
Can we tell their purity from looking at the photos?
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I read "Hilbertschmidte"
The whole process is going to need a ton of coal and calcium carbonate and heat, and you have to have a way to safely dispose of SO2 gases and CuSO4aq liquids. And there don't seem to be anything that sounds safe and clean about this process.
This is common for bulk industrial materials. For example, it is cheaper for many countries to send their crude oil to the US to be refined than for them to refine it themselves.
Chocolate requires various ingredients to make that changes the characteristics of the chocolate. It also, famously, doesn't ship well.
Copper ingots, however, weigh less than copper ore and if they are actually too low quality they can be resmelted into a more pure level.
The only reason I can think of why you might actually want the ore is you also want and are extracting other secondary minerals.
Most mines are in the north, but the hydro capacity is far from them in the south. That's one challenge, but to me doesn't explain why. Chile nationalised copper with aims to develop our industry, but then the US decided to sabotage our democracy.
That isn't the Dutch Disease, it's anti-intellectualism. It is where Pol Pots come from eventually, and it never leads anywhere good.
edit: also no reason to make this thread deeper, but you seem to be missing the idea that I am insulting Pinochet. He didn't do it for any reason other than power and money. That is worse. For whatever reason, you appear to think I have views I do not, and are assuming the worst of my replies. I will not reply further.
Get people fighting about who is exploiting them, and they cannot unite against anyone exploiting them.
edit: no need to make the thread deeper. I agree with your reply, too. Two things can be correct at once, and usually are.
What was drawn like a "defined spin" for pedagogy should only have been coloured different. The lone spins are always part of a longer-range quantum superposition, maybe better represented as blue blobs. The lowest "excitations" are (superpositions of) triplets, for example.
Btw I put quotes around excitations because you touched on a mysterious aspect of these systems called the "spin gap". TFA mentions it. They don't even know whether this spin gap exists! Indeed, the term "liquid" means there might not be a spin gap. (It'd be best to colour the singlet blobs orange-red and the triplet blobs red-orange)
[0] In your parlance, a "collapse" literally means dropping to a macroscopic ground state across a gap, but a liquid is already "arbitrarily" close to the ground state. "Collapsing into defined spins" will take the system _out_ of the ground state, so it can't happen spontaneously... Or so it's believed..
then they show heating the material to break a spin singlet and demonstrate the broken singlet atoms moving around the liquid (~2:00 mark). I'm referring to that breaking as a "collapse"
I would expect that a singlet in superposition could not coexist with an adjacent "non-collapsed" atom because it's defined magnetic field would need to interact with it's neighbors breaking the superposition.
It is more accurate to think of the spins as always interacting with one another.. at 0K temperature only singlets are allowed, increasing the temperature by just a bit, both singlets and triplets coexist, etc. even that is just a picture.
To start with an everyday analogy. if you know you have 51cents in your piggy bank, but not what the precise breakdown is. Then you must have at least one penny. But you don't know exactly how many pennies you have unless you take a look.
Unlike pennies though, the singlets and triplets cannot be distinguished from one another. One can only measure how many "excess" triplets there are, one cannot point to where these triplets are hiding. The measurement doesn't "cause" a collapse, after the measurement, you know there is some spin imbalance but it is still in some superposition
Anyways.. to fully get what I am going with this, you will have to play with the math on your own. I have, but it's hard to translate all that to English. I'm just trying to point out that the interesting part is not in "collapse" but rather the "failure to collapse"--- the failure to take the system out of superpositions. Because the spins are always interacting.
Or maybe I just don't understand enough to explain it like Feynman.. heh.. but if you turn some of what Feynman has said in plain English into math, you would see that some of his stuff is also.. misleading
IBM must have some sims you can run on your PC, ask ChatGPT to solve and draw a small "Heisenberg model" that imports their libs. If you can take Taiwanese:
Apparently done by this artist? https://laoexperiment.bandcamp.com/album/quantum-magnet-soun...
Not a big fan of the music though, sounded like I left another video playing in the background at points.
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That solves every problem that a warp bubble can't.
Clearly we must either reverse the polarity of the tachyon emitter (this voids the warranty), or shift the phase of the quantum crystal matrix (that’s in spec).
ngl I enjoyed the "Unipolar magnets" in Dyson Sphere Program (excellent game btw if you're into factorio style mechanics).
Alien archeologists would have a field day figuring out what they were for.
But if the Antikythera Mechanism is anything to go by, I think they would at least figure out it was an electronic communication device.
Which, joking aside, isn’t too far from the truth.
"""Civilization will not survive more than a few centuries into the future. If that sad assertion be true, then what will the earth look like in the far future? There was a television show some years ago entitled “Life After People”. It did a good job of showing how the artifacts of civilization would decay, erode, disintegrate, and disappear. What’s surprising is that most of the stuff won’t last more than a few centuries. Our big cities, freeways, bridges, skyscrapers, and so forth will be untraceable within a millenium of the collapse of civilization. What will survive for longer?
...
This is why I occasionally dig a deep hole — perhaps two feet deep — on my land, drop a marble into it, and cover it up again. I always dig such holes on flat land halfway between the slope and the creek. The soil erosion here is slowest. For many years, the rains will slowly move dirt down the slopes toward the creek. On this flat section of land, the process will be very slow, and the loss of dirt to the creek will be matched by the gain of dirt from above. But eventually the former process will outperform the latter process, and dirt will start eroding away from above the marble. Eventually, all the dirt over the marble will be washed away and it will be exposed. """
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or rather Petroleum
I mean, can an ant tell that a highway or skyscraper is artificial?
Same with UFOs. It seems to have changed in the past few years, but for a long time interest in them was associated with wackiness, and it was not something you could really discuss with a genuine sense of interest without the stain of appearing to believe something you didn't. It's intellectually and socially important to be able to be able to be curious and speculate without the appearance of belief in something.
Of course, now, we know they probably had as much similarity to lizards as we do.
Another interesting thought experiment is an octopus civilization. They are probably smart enough to have also developed along those lines.
Depending on what that civilization would have looked like, there might not be much left.
I remember reading an essay (probably linked from here), that it might only take a couple of million years, to completely wipe all traces of even an advanced, mechanized civilization. They posited that the only evidence of our civilization, in a few million years, would be marbles.
It depends who comes searching. u235 has a half-life of ~700m years, so finding it in enough places (i.e. rocket silos, even if underground) and obviously processed into spheres, would raise some advanced alien eyebrows. There's also a chance that some things we left on the Moon / in high orbits will survive for a few million years. (also the test tubes on Mars and the rovers themselves, some have RTGs which, even if "depleted" of usable energy might still register as artificial)
If only, but no. Thanks to equally ubiquitous video and image editing and now AI and the profit potential of social media there are more such claims than anyone can count.
The sitting president of the US is even intentionally stirring the pot releasing obvious AI photos of himself walking with aliens while the government is releasing "evidence" that isn't any more credible than the stuff you find on Reddit and Youtube. A significant number of Americans already believe the government has confirmed the existence of aliens and UFOs on Earth thanks to "whistleblowers" like Grusch and the Tic-Tac stuff, even though the government's official position has never changed, and most of that "evidence" has been debunked, and Grusch et.al have yet to provide anything conclusive.
Far from going away, the whole thing has become normalized and I feel like we're going to reach the point where more people believe in interdimensional space elves than believe humans ever landed on the moon by the end of the decade.
Heck, when just playing in the dirt or sand as a little kid you sort of instinctually learn that.
So once you have that, what is left to learn of the design process? Cutting and assembly.
Cutting we figured out already, with copper tools you can use the desert sand as a diamond abrasive (has microscopic diamonds in it). Put sand on block, move a saw blade with no teeth back and forth.
Assembly: we do have some idea of the assembly process, but yes we will never know for certain because it was either taken for granted in that age (like we take for granted how to use modern technology), or written on parchment long since destroyed.
Design: we have countless examples in the region of pre-giza pyramids that have different height/width ratios. And how the older ones are less stable due to having more height to width (taller than wide).
So yeah, designing really is do it at smaller scale. Heck hand held bricks would give you a lot of practice and design reference when building the real thing, for a fraction of the cost.
And you missed the most obvious thing we learned, (a) they had a ton of time (no YouTube), (b) they built it in the off-season and paid the workers in food - not slaves. It was a public works project, that was used to keep the citizens fed.
But now they have suddenly a meaning so hey, maybe it's somebody like us, smart as us, that created them many eons ago to harness quantum capabilities back in the day.
Didn't some guy use a huge rock as a doorstop before someone realized it was gold and worth a lot.
It was gold before it was realized it was gold. What did it's discover matter? It didn't change what it was. The worth as 'gold' is totally superimposed by the humans.
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Looking at the chemical structure it is a supergene mineral but what makes it unique is that it has zinc without the metals that normally associated with zinc in these deposits. That is an unusual elemental configuration. It seems like a thing you could model but it isn’t surprising that no one has because it wouldn’t have a use in mining.
The places where you would find this ore may not be in places with commercially viable deposit scale as a copper play, especially if it is mostly copper-zinc. The US west is littered with concentrated micro-deposits of diverse copper minerals but no one maps them in a serious way.
And yeah, it could be a lot of undiscovered places as a supergene mineral. The ones I found were right next to an industrial sized heap mine though. A lot of Chile’s more recent mining efforts target supergene minerals. That’s also why it was measured though…
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The amount of carbon used in the reaction itself is totally neglibile, compared to other overheads.
Ea-nāṣir will still receive complaints, presumably.
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What they said was what it looks like, and in fact it does look exactly like what they said.
The comment contains the exact same content and value as a bot comment. It doesn't matter who or what wrote it, the critique of the comment itself holds water.
So the critique was not "a bot wrote this" it was "either a bot wrote this, or a human wrote a comment that is no better than the ones bots write".
You know what else a human might do even worse than a bot a lot of times? A bot would read this and apologize for getting something so wrong.
How's this? Is it more human-like now?
(your feedback may be used to improve the model for everyone)
That is, till all currently-up tectonic plates submerge for melting. But since they don't move by same speed, some of it will probably remain around till sun inflates and scorches surface or even absorbs Earth. That will be probably it, melted surface will hide or destroy all of it. But thats what, 1 billion years in future?
We gotta start working seriously on fusion torch drives and fully self contained space habitats that can operate without any external materials for thousands of years. That and power plants that can last that long.
The shape is erased, but the chemical composition mostly remains.
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That's a more recent development. UFO sightings surge when the technology aligns with them: when the camera is blurry or you're not expected to carry one, or when faking with editing or AI is trivial. But there was a long middle when everyone had access to phone cameras yet editing/faking was hard, and UFO sightings by civilians became rare.
Same with the Loch Ness monster, the Yeti, Big Foot, etc. These monsters were apparently very shy during the phone camera era, but I bet you with AI image editing they will overcome their shyness!
Elements run in herds. If you see zinc, you often see lead, silver, et al in significant quantities. If you see copper, you often see gold, antimony, arsenic, et al. Both groups are also often found together. If it is a supergene ore, you also often see hematite, limonite, and other iron minerals.
To see zinc and copper together without being contaminated by the rest of either their herd is actually pretty unusual. You can find samples of zinc or copper individually that have chemistry similar to the target mineral but not both together. Your objective is rare for a reason. From a geochemistry standpoint how this mineral happens is a pretty interesting question.
The chloride aspect helpfully limits the search space. Atacama, including where you found your samples, has massive surface salt domes which is undoubtedly where the chloride comes from. You do not see this in vast parts of the American copper belt that are otherwise rich in zinc and copper. That might actually be a way to target it in North America but I suspect it isn’t well-mapped. It would require a modicum of research. On the other hand, it isn’t well-mapped in South America either. I know about it because I was there.
I am a chemist by training and a geology nerd. I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time in both the Atacama and the American Mountain West, both of which are prime search areas. It is probably possible to develop a heuristic for locating concentrated deposits of this specific mineral but that is a research and exploration exercise on its own.
Do you even realize the irony of your unnecessary complaint about potential bots generating more noise than actual bots?
I never actually said they are a bad judge of what comments are botted, just merely suggested it as a possibility.
Otherwise:
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html
Suffice to say, I'd thus kindly reject being a "bad comprehender of what words mean", thank you very much. It was a perfectly reasonable initial reading of their comment as far as I'm concerned. It's ambiguous. Happens.
The fact that "is this AI? this is AI." is a damn near fixture of every thread these days, doesn't help.