9 ms·
I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert
- koolala 4mo ago"In theory, samples with no-interlayer impurities should look something like this in direct measurements" Can we tell their purity from looking at the photos?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- s0rce 4mo agoI think the materially, even pure, is strongly colored, so you can't easily determine impurities visually, unlike diamonds and sapphires and other colorless-when-pure minerals.
- abreidenbach 4mo ago[dead]
- rbanffy 4mo agoOne interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits. It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.
- mgaunard 4mo agoI was literally thinking ancient civilizations/aliens throughout the whole article.
- rbanffy 4mo agoIt’d need to be really ancient in this case. To the point only mineral traces and no structure would remain.
- abreidenbach 4mo ago[dead]
- vintagedave 4mo agoIt is. I wish the conspiracy theorist 'the pyramids could not have been built by humans' etc etc crowds didn't exist, because I wish there was space to theorise about pre-human, pre-ape intelligent culture just for fun. 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.
- Etheryte 4mo agoWas the sense of wackiness wrong though? Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous. It's useful to play around with ideas, yes, but it's also important to acknowledge that some ideas simply are wishful thinking.
- krapp 4mo ago>Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous. 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.
- Gravityloss 4mo ago
- baxtr 4mo agoIt’s gotta be coins though. 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.
- nntwozz 4mo agoIf humanity suddenly died tomorrow the world would be littered with handy rectangular glass pieces all over the world. Alien archeologists would have a field day figuring out what they were for.
- Tade0 4mo agoShame that dopant drift would render the chips inoperable eventually. But if the Antikythera Mechanism is anything to go by, I think they would at least figure out it was an electronic communication device.
- Mtinie 4mo ago“…used for religious purposes and/or tribal rituals.” (Far-future Archeologist, Zarb-7854) Which, joking aside, isn’t too far from the truth.
- tdeck 4mo agoThey're clearly a ceremonial artifact, and their reflective surface is used to perform some religious ritual or other, probably related to the sun.
- jareklupinski 4mo ago21st century humans had notoriously poor light receptors, so they used these "smart" devices to reflect more sun into their eyes in order to see while hunched over
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- darkwater 4mo agoOr, it's just another spin of the anthropomorphism bias we have. If anyone found those mineral what, 50 years ago? or let's say 150 to predate every quantum theory possibility... well, they would have been just nice and weird crystals with 0 importance, just because we didn't know about their properties. 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.
- jameshart 4mo agoThey were in fact discovered 54 years ago. The quantum properties weren’t recognized until 2012.
- FrustratedMonky 4mo agoWhat does it matter when something was realized versus its anthropomorphism? 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.
- somewhatgoated 4mo agoThere are a bunch of stories about people using valuable rocks as a doorstop, meteorites, gold, amber etc
- darkwater 4mo agoIt means that if you remove the meaning humans give to to, it's much easier to explain it as a coincidence, something that is produced naturally and it just happens to have the right property (for any value of property).
- rbanffy 4mo agoI think the funniest part is the purity. I wouldn’t expect a natural material would be purer than something made in a lab with the explicit goal of making it pure and regular. Structure being regular could be an effect of conditions that we don’t want to pay for in the lab, but the purity is weird. I am sure the explanation (and there is a natural one) is very interesting and might open up some avenues for simpler manufacturing of the material.
- Razengan 4mo agoOil or rather Petroleum I mean, can an ant tell that a highway or skyscraper is artificial?
- rbanffy 4mo agoFrom their individual perspectives, it has been there since the beginning of time and will remain there long after they are gone.
- jareklupinski 4mo agoit's more likely that they used our planet as a "greenhouse" to grow these crystals for themselves, and we're just the lichen that happens to grow on the walls as a consequence of their process
- zeusdclxvi 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_spin_liquid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_spin_liquid Neat
- Razengan 4mo agoThe animation is pretty good and helps to easily understand the phenomenon
- dekhn 4mo agothis looks like those bot comments on youtube videos.
- Razengan 4mo ago"I didn't expect to understand this topic like with most articles about weird shit on Wikipedia but wow, that animation actually brought the DC of grokking that knowledge within the reach of my INT modifier! Like super cool, dude!" How's this? Is it more human-like now? (your feedback may be used to improve the model for everyone)
- perching_aix 4mo agoMaybe you're a bad judge of what comments are botted?
- dekhn 4mo agoI didn't say it was a bot comment, I said it looks like a bot comment. Many of the shorts Youtube shows me are almost identical to that message.
- perching_aix 4mo agoSo are you like, tentative about it, or did you conclude that it isn't a bot comment in the end? If the latter, what was the ultimate rationale? Did you check their post history or something?
- totetsu 4mo agoWas there a DeLorean hidden in the mine nearby?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- contingencies 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator
- Animats 4mo agoBy the same author: "Altered States from the Inside Out: A Physicist’s Embodied Journey Through Seizures, Psychedelics, and Consciousness"[1] [1] https://medium.com/@breid.at/seizures-crystals-psychedelics-and-quantum-mysticism-perspectives-from-a-stanford-physics-phd-5cf7118cbc78 https://medium.com/@breid.at/seizures-crystals-psychedelics-...
- aaron695 4mo ago[dead]
- pugworthy 4mo agoAt first I thought you were playing the Ad Hominem card there, but reading the article I'm assuming you mean to point out that the author seems like a rather interesting individual. 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."
- felipeyanez 4mo ago[dead]
- Havoc 4mo agoQuantum crystals sound more like something out of a video game than reality
- riskable 4mo agoThe quest: Recover data stored in the quantum crystal matrix by building a tachyon pulse emitter.
- IAmBroom 4mo agoSimple. Just reverse the polarity. That solves every problem that a warp bubble can't.
- pavel_lishin 4mo agoAnd blow out all the Heisenburg compensators on board? I won't do it, captain!
- bee_rider 4mo agoSomehow the technobabble of reversing the polarity of the quantum crystal matrix doesn’t quite work… 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).
- Havoc 4mo ago>Simple. Just reverse the polarity. ngl I enjoyed the "Unipolar magnets" in Dyson Sphere Program (excellent game btw if you're into factorio style mechanics).
- incognito124 4mo agoMy immediate thought upon seeing the title was Outer Wilds
- stared 4mo ago> Herbertsmithite I read "Hilbertschmidte"
- jerojero 4mo agoI was arguing with a Chilean friend who moved a few years ago to the USA. He was telling me how Chile doesn't do good science. I challenged his claim saying Chile actually had great scientists that were severely underfunded (Chile's investment in science and research is ~0.4% of the GDP versus the OECD average of ~2.7%). 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.
- Zardoz84 4mo ago¿Para que inventar nosotros ? Que ellos ya lo inventan. - A Spanish politician in the first years of XX century to a Spanish inventor working with early radios.
- cogman10 4mo agoThat's actually a bit wild that Chile isn't refining or smelting copper. 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).
- ninalanyon 4mo agoAustralia behaves the same way, exports ore to China and buys back the refined products. Both countries have abundant energy (hydro and solar) but have old fashioned mining interests in charge.
- inside_story 4mo agonew spice unlocked
- sneilan1 4mo agoI wish the author had not used the words "Abandoned Mine in the Atacama Desert" Abandoned mine would've been fine. But now you've communicated the value of your find and given a basic hint of what mines to look up. The bright side is so far, author is probably fine because nobody's buying quantum crystals yet in a futures market. At least the author has time to secure property rights and buy out old mines.
- jandrewrogers 4mo agoThe vast copper-producing region of the US has large areas of similar mineralization. If they found it in the Atacama then you can find it in the US as well.
- abreidenbach 4mo agoYou sure can! Small amounts have been confirmed in Arizona. I wouldn’t be surprised if deposits were quite extensive. Over 10 different confirmed locations worldwide. See the Mindat page on herbertsmithite if you’re curious
- jandrewrogers 4mo agoGood shout for Mindat, I should have searched that immediately (I use it for other things). 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.
- abreidenbach 4mo agoWhat metals normally associate with Zinc? Isn’t copper a pretty normal associate? There’s a lot of sulphates, silicon, silver, iron, etc in other minerals at this mine too 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…
- ludicrousdispla 4mo agoSo would these be more suitable for a flux capacitor or warp drive?
- poppafuze 4mo agopowers the quantum heartbeat detector
- pimlottc 4mo agoI just want to say, kudos to the author for the excellent captions. So many articles include images with no captions whatsoever and expect the reader to somehow just know what they're looking at. Even when it's pretty obvious, it never hurts to state it plainly with a short caption.
- abreidenbach 4mo ago[dead]
- lovlar 4mo ago”San Francisco mine” - is that a coincidence?
- abreidenbach 4mo agoHi everyone! This is Dr. Aaron Breidenbach, the author of the article. 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_lead-author-here-thanks-for-promoting-this-share-7431924477279764480-OgZq?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAACCp-N8BlI3xgQ7HOAL7RERF82QmuSVhXhg 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