Face me now, Bitch!
"Hums Light Saber Sound".
Watch Symphogear
Can we make it in Chris Barrie's likeness?
Direct all enquiries to Jamie B Good
Science is awesome.
edited 3rd Oct '13 12:23:02 PM by Ekuran
So if I understand this correctly Hard Light could actually be a thing someday? Wow.
Also the Pure Energy page might have to be rewritten a little if this becomes a real thing.
scratching at .8, just hopin'
I want a more elegant material, for a more civilized age.
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Gimmick tech and freaky materials are no match for a good bit of plastic in your product, kid.
I thought there were already five states of matter.
I've only heard of four. Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. I think there's stuff like semi-solids but they're not really counted from what I can tell.
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
There's also something called a Bose-Einsteinean condensate. (If I got that wrong I won't be very embarrassed because I wrote it without checking.)
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
You're right. According to wikipedia the four I mentioned are the fundamental states of matter. There are also other states that seem to be either the main four with special properties or some kind of fusion of the main four.
Bose-Einstein condensate would be what you would get if you managed to cool something down to absolute zero. That's not actually something we've been able to do, but it's there. So that makes five.
NOT THE BEES
Close enough, yeah. Quantum effects are usually chaotic and cancel each other out, but when you supercool a gas low enough, the particles all uniformly "condense" to their lowest state and you get fun macroscale quantum effects now that they're all doing the same thing.
No. You generally have to get reasonably close to absolute zero to see it, but bosons' lowest quantum states are pretty accessible with some effort (all you have to do is make sure they don't have enough energy to hit the next one up). For instance, superfluid helium is essentially a condensate, and we made that before WWII. If you want to be pedantic and require an actual gas, that happened in 1995 at JILA.
edited 3rd Oct '13 3:14:17 PM by Pykrete
Is it a bad thing that I just imagined Bifrost (namely the various Marvel versions) as a possible application?
Because rainbow bridges are awesome.
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
Physicists: trolls who enjoy making chemists cry and break out the correction fluid. ![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
...of Matter
So basically, (Bear with me, I've never exactly taken a physics class before, so I might make some errors.) the article talks about a group of scientists managing to create a fifth form of matter by making photons (light particles) behave like molecules after being shot at extremely cooled rubidium ions. It's more or less best compared to a real life lightsaber.
As the photons enter the cloud of cold atoms, Lukin said, its energy excites atoms along its path, causing the photon to slow dramatically. As the photon moves through the cloud, that energy is handed off from atom to atom, and eventually exits the cloud with the photon.
"When the photon exits the medium, its identity is preserved," Lukin said. "It's the same effect we see with refraction of light in a water glass. The light enters the water, it hands off part of its energy to the medium, and inside it exists as light and matter coupled together, but when it exits, it's still light. The process that takes place is the same it's just a bit more extreme — the light is slowed considerably, and a lot more energy is given away than during refraction." When Lukin and colleagues fired two photons into the cloud, they were surprised to see them exit together, as a single molecule.
The reason they form the never-before-seen molecules?
An effect called a Rydberg blockade, Lukin said, which states that when an atom is excited, nearby atoms cannot be excited to the same degree. In practice, the effect means that as two photons enter the atomic cloud, the first excites an atom, but must move forward before the second photon can excite nearby atoms.
Now, I wonder what applications besides those listed in the article what amounts to real life Hard Light could be used in.
edited 25th Sep '13 2:01:32 PM by rmctagg09
Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.