alt Hacker NewsI found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert
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Hi 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_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 [email protected] .
Thank you for listening!
Dr Breidenbach
By 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-...
Quantum crystals sound more like something out of a video game than reality
I 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.
One 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.
I 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.
”San Francisco mine” - is that a coincidence?
So would these be more suitable for a flux capacitor or warp drive?
"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?
new spice unlocked
powers the quantum heartbeat detector
[dead]
> Herbertsmithite
I read "Hilbertschmidte"
I 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.