Hacker News Reader

A new phase of article has been found at Birmingham in which, at a pressure of 800 words, key interstitial details disappear from the lexical lattice. In one example, the summary of a topic about two different forms of liquid water was found to allude to evidence of their existence coming from a computer simulation, yet without giving away the slightest hint at the expected temperature and pressure ranges at which these forms are expected to actually occur.

View on HN

> yet without giving away the slightest hint at the expected temperature and pressure ranges at which these forms are expected to actually occur.

If it makes you feel better, this information isn't even clearly presented in the paper :)

For computational studies like this, one should generally assume that any explicit 'Temperature' or 'Pressure' is a fiction. The important things are the shape of the trends in behavior with T and P. But as this behavior is dependent on a number of other semi-arbitrary parameters, the actual values of T and P themselves with the simulation probably do not map particuarly well to real life.

Also, physicists like to use reduced unitless parameters (e.g. this paper uses T* = kT/e_BB, where e_BB is an energy parameter used in the colloidal model). This is convenient for math, and also keeps pesky reality separate from elegant models.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com