What a solid made of electrons looks like
nature.com
nature.com
Often, I'll read a science article in a blog, or local newspaper, or general-interest magazine. I'll see something obviously incorrect, and say "well, it's not a science outlet, they can't be expected to know the science that well, and they're just explaining it to lay people anyway, so it's good enough. I'll double check this with a reliable science news source."
But you'd think if anyone could get it right, and trust their readers to care about them getting it right, it would be Nature! If Nature is going to start going to lower their standards to go after clicks, I dunno what reliable source I'm supposed to double check things with.
> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Pulled from https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
Reddit.
I'm serious. If you search for the discussion about the news article on a right subreddit, or HN, or spelunk Twitter enough, there's a good chance you'll find a domain expert - sometimes even the paper's author themselves, or someone who works with them - explaining the science correctly and/or pointing out the bullshit in the press report.
(I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient if scientists were writing press releases themselves, and the journalists/PR people would be chasing grants for them instead. It seems like a better match for their individual skills anyway.)
>I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient if scientists were writing press releases themselves
Agree, and I think everyone here has experienced the phenomenon where someone on reddit/HN/twitter has explained something far better than a media outlet. The thing to keep in mind when trying to understand this is that absolutely __everyone__ responds to incentives. With a news organization, no matter what that organization is or their goals, the chief incentive is readership, not accuracy or anything else. Not saying that the writers are anything other than well intentioned and honest or that they don't care deeply about the truth, but the reality of mortal existence is to maximize behaviors that you believe benefit you.
A news org is benefited by people reading what they say, not by being right. Reddit/twitter/HN often is a better source of truth because people often post because they have a desire to be heard, be understood, share information, tell the truth or some other reason that does not involve selling ads against you reading what they say.
I've experienced the opposite, though, too.
Posts with thousands upon thousands of upvotes and a little comment with a dozen saying "this is entirely wrong, and here's a bunch of proof, and here's an expert explaining it properly".
I do this myself, too: if the discussion underneath a HN submission rescues an otherwise bad article, or even develops into a completely unrelated but interesting tangent, I'll happily upvote it. Sometimes the only value of the submitted article is in the discussion it starts - but that still makes the particular submission valuable.
How could that even work?
“See, we can’t be expected to convey complex stuff like this accurately. We’re just not that good at parsing the subtleties of advanced science…”
‘Aren’t y’all the premiere science journal?’
The article quickly explains (even the caption on the lead image) that it's an arrangement within a normal solid sheet.
I don't really understand in what sense the internal electron arrangement is 'a solid', but hey, as clickbait, it worked.
From Feynman:
If you were standing at arm’s length from someone and each of you had one percent more electrons than protons, the repelling force would be incredible. How great? Enough to lift the Empire State Building? No! To lift Mount Everest? No! The repulsion would be enough to lift a “weight” equal to that of the entire earth!
The electric field would be hard to contain just under the train, the charge would really really try hard to find somewhere else to be, there would be some crazy ionization of the air going on… flying a kite in a thunderstorm would probably be quite safe by comparison to being close to such an apparatus.
The latent energy of electromagnetic repulsion between the two of you (never mind between the parts of each of your bodies) would be a bit more than ((1%*80kg/2amu*electroncharge)^2 coulombconst / meter), or on the order of a megaton. Not megaton tnt, a megaton of just energy (comparable to a million tons of antimatter).
0: https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/what-if-i-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvated_electron
They can be used to, among other things, reduce pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine.
I read the piece, saw the headline and was immediately confused: Like we can have matter that is ELECTRONS only?
If the conditions are just right, some of the electrons inside a material will arrange themselves into a tidy honeycomb pattern — like a solid within a solid. Physicists have now directly imaged these ‘Wigner crystals’, named after the Hungarian-born theorist Eugene Wigner, who first imagined them almost 90 years ago.My mind boggles, if electrons were packed like this then we'd need conditions somewhere between those of a neutron star and a black hole singularity I'd imagine.
Does anyone have any concept of what such matter would look like - its properties, etc.?
It would have a lot of charge.
You've just crushed my dreams of experiencing a Star Trek holodeck or replicator based on this technology.
The semiconductors are being used to generate a contained cloud of electrons, basically a gas of electrons between the semiconductors.
That gas is then cooled until it crystallizes.
So what you are seeing is a layer of crystallized electrons.
> It is not a "solid" that is only composed of electrons, with no atomic nuclei present.
That is indeed what it is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner_crystal
From Wikipedia:
“ A Wigner crystal is the solid (crystalline) phase of electrons first predicted by Eugene Wigner in 1934. A gas of electrons moving in 2D or 3D in a uniform, inert, neutralizing background will crystallize and form a lattice if the electron density is less than a critical value.”
A better title would be: Here's the first photo ever of a layer of pure electrons. Still click-attracting, yet factually correct (as far as I understand).
If you've seen a stack of spheres, with the bottom layer in rows offset by one radius such that each sphere touches six others at the same height, and the next layer nestled in the intersections of this bottom layer, that's a hexagonal close packing.
Also, the "hexagons are the bestagons" attitude generalizes to three dimensions by dismissing face-centered cubic packing as an inferior way to look at the arrangement.
To generalize the Youtube video aspect, see also this Matt Parker/Steve Mould video on spherical packing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3inLMXcetUA
Wouldn't a packing that is irregular in all directions be more robust?
In the "bestagons" video, it is explained that the hexagons win because there are no straight lines in the packing, but I'd expect these to correspond to planes in the 3d case.