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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      6. LIQUID HELIUM(-4) What happens when you have a material made of bosonic atoms that remains liquid all the way down to zero temperature? It becomes a "superfluid" and does crazy things like: - climb the walls of its container and empty itself onto the floor ("fountain effect")pic.twitter.com/1hWvsZ5eDB

      1 reply 1 retweet 35 likes
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    2. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      - If you put it in a bucket, and then start rotating the bucket, the superfluid will remain completely still. Then, at a critical rotation frequency, the fluid will start to develop quantized vortices.pic.twitter.com/1vwe6nxYtz

      2 replies 1 retweet 37 likes
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    3. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      7. LIQUID HELIUM-3 This is a distinct form of helium, purified so that it only has fermionic atoms (1 neutron per atom instead of 2). It isn't supposed to become a superfluid because it is made of fermions, which cannot undergo Bose condensation. But He-3 goes superfluid anyway.

      2 replies 1 retweet 35 likes
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    4. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      Somehow, two fermionic atoms bind to each other (in a process analogous to superconductivity, where two electrons bind together), to make "composite bosons". These composite bosons form a superfluid.

      1 reply 0 retweets 24 likes
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    5. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      Another crazy thing about He-3: at low-T its solid phase has more entropy than its liquid phase. (I know, this violates everything your high school chemistry teacher taught you about what entropy is) This means that, under the right conditions, He-3 _freezes_ when you heat it up

      3 replies 11 retweets 66 likes
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    6. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      8. IRON Magnets are crazy in general (as noted by a certain clown posse). There is actually a very general proof that classical physics does not allow magnetism to exist: https://thiscondensedlife.wordpress.com/2016/10/29/bohr-van-leeuwen-theorem-and-micromacro-disconnect/ … So magnets are macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics

      1 reply 1 retweet 44 likes
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    7. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      Iron is especially difficult because it contains both magnetism and freely-conducting electrons. This is something we still don't have a good theory of. So far our theories of magnetism are mostly built to describe little bar magnets (the electrons themselves) frozen in place.

      1 reply 0 retweets 20 likes
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    8. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      (You can read my intro explainer to where magnets come from here: https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/where-does-magnetism-come-from/ … Anyone who claims to explain magnetism without talking about the Pauli exclusion principle [and the "exchange interaction"] is ripping you off.)

      1 reply 4 retweets 32 likes
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    9. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      9. COPPER To me, the funniest thing about copper is always that it turns green when it rusts. So our Statue of Libery started out looking like a flaming beacon of hope and quickly turned into Kermit the frog.pic.twitter.com/c4DwuAaQhM

      2 replies 2 retweets 39 likes
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    10. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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      Here's something else weird about copper. Electrons in its interior are flying around at (literally) a million miles per hour. If you take a census of their momentum, you'll find that all the values sit neatly inside a geometric surface ("Fermi surface") that looks like this:pic.twitter.com/44CCA26fhG

      2 replies 0 retweets 23 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 16
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      Replying to @gravity_levity

      Can I request cobalt to pair with copper, given that semiconductors are soon gonna go cobalt...?

      12:07 PM - 16 Dec 2020
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      • Death will not release you
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        1. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 16
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          Replying to @vgr

          Not sure I know anything interesting about cobalt, though. We should get to silicon at some point, though.

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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