Hacker News Reader

Comment by rusk | Hacker News Reader

Well general relativity breaks down at very small scales, and imparts the need for quantum mechanics ...

If you are really interested, somebody has bothered to make a special-relativity & quantum-indeterminacy compatible formulation of Navier-Stokes suitable for calculating shockwaves in extremely dense mediums such as the neutronium neutron stars are thought to be made of (where the speed of sound is comparable to the speed of light in a vacuum, hence the relativity, and the matter is degenerate and in states of superposition, hence the quantum indeterminacy). I don’t have the reference right with me at the moment (mainly because I just looked at it and though “oh horror!” and averted my eyes) but I know where and how to dig it up for you if you want.

Of course... for obvious reasons it hasn't been experimentally verified...

For the record: I also saw it coded in FORTRAN. Yeah. It's like catching grandma in starkers.

Sir, would you please post a link to this code?

It wasn’t my code to link to and I probably last saw it in 1996, back in the era of dot-matrix printouts on green-and-white continuous paper (on a Windows NT 3.5 machine running FORTRAN PowerStation, if you care to commiserate). I think I can dig up the paper where the equation was published, though.

EDIT: This isn't the paper I had in mind, and the equation presented is ‘merely’ relativistic, but it gives you a feel for the beast: https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0402502.pdf (see section C).

Thank you! If you have more time to look for the original, I would find it exceptionally interesting; however I understand if the keywords are lost to you.

Can you explain roughly what the quantum corrections were?

The quantum corrections basically dealt with the fact that the waves occurred on the scale at which quantum indeterminacy obtains and as such you had to account for the fact that the neutrons had both been moved and had not moved, leading to a superposition of states.

Was this for starquake or GRB modeling?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com