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.
Australia behaves the same way, exports ore to China and buys back the refined products. Both countries have abundant energy (hydro and solar) but have old fashioned mining interests in charge.
I had a Chilean coworker who earned his degree in molecular biology while in Chile. He emigrated to the US (sometime in the early-mid 90's) as he claimed there was little opportunity for scientists in Chile. He worked a basic job that paid the bills while he built up a side business exporting appliances secretly stuffed with gun parts. He was able to retire back to Chile on that money.
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".
That isn't the Dutch Disease, it's anti-intellectualism. It is where Pol Pots come from eventually, and it never leads anywhere good.
I think some of it ties into incrementalism versus "great man" theory. I believe we dramatically underestimate how much of any new thing is (A) not actually as new as it looks and (B) absolutely required a thousand smaller things like precision screws or pure materials.
> 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"
Guess what the other far right president of the region says (Argentina's). Makes me sad.
It's the same for the whole region, friend. Shut up and keep mining, harvesting, or raising these cows for the gringos, ain't no need to get clever about it.
¿Para que inventar nosotros ? Que ellos ya lo inventan.
- A Spanish politician in the first years of XX century to a Spanish inventor working with early radios.
The animation is great though I don't understand how the collapsed singlet can exist in proximity to the superimposed ones. I would expect the presence of the defined spin to create an "observation" of a neighbor and immediately collapse the entire material.
At first I thought you were playing the Ad Hominem card there, but reading the article I'm assuming you mean to point out that the author seems like a rather interesting individual.
I like one of the introductory sentences where he says, "I am a strange person who has had a strange life, even relative to that of my strange and high achieving peers here."
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.
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.
The vast copper-producing region of the US has large areas of similar mineralization. If they found it in the Atacama then you can find it in the US as well.
Most famous example was Louis XIV who created medals specifically to preserve French history for future archaeologists.
At that time they realized that they knew almost everything about Romans and Greek through preserved medals.
So the King created a vast medal series (Histoire Métallique) intended to outlast paper, books, and buildings.
These bronze and gold medals were intentionally buried in the foundations of monuments like the Louvre, specifically waiting for future generations to excavate them.
it's more likely that they used our planet as a "greenhouse" to grow these crystals for themselves, and we're just the lichen that happens to grow on the walls as a consequence of their process
It is. I wish the conspiracy theorist 'the pyramids could not have been built by humans' etc etc crowds didn't exist, because I wish there was space to theorise about pre-human, pre-ape intelligent culture just for fun.
Same with UFOs. It seems to have changed in the past few years, but for a long time interest in them was associated with wackiness, and it was not something you could really discuss with a genuine sense of interest without the stain of appearing to believe something you didn't. It's intellectually and socially important to be able to be able to be curious and speculate without the appearance of belief in something.
That ol' Silurian Hypothesis is fun, but, knowing how damn smart birds are, it's not inconceivable that the theropods could have become advanced enough to be at least tool-users.
Of course, now, we know they probably had as much similarity to lizards as we do.
Another interesting thought experiment is an octopus civilization. They are probably smart enough to have also developed along those lines.
Depending on what that civilization would have looked like, there might not be much left.
I remember reading an essay (probably linked from here), that it might only take a couple of million years, to completely wipe all traces of even an advanced, mechanized civilization. They posited that the only evidence of our civilization, in a few million years, would be marbles.
Was the sense of wackiness wrong though? Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous. It's useful to play around with ideas, yes, but it's also important to acknowledge that some ideas simply are wishful thinking.
Building the pyramids is the easy part. You need food, labor, stone. Designing the bastards is where the true mystery lies for me. And it doesn't seem that we have very good history on the design process. Unlike the building one.
Or, it's just another spin of the anthropomorphism bias we have. If anyone found those mineral what, 50 years ago? or let's say 150 to predate every quantum theory possibility... well, they would have been just nice and weird crystals with 0 importance, just because we didn't know about their properties.
But now they have suddenly a meaning so hey, maybe it's somebody like us, smart as us, that created them many eons ago to harness quantum capabilities back in the day.
I think the funniest part is the purity. I wouldn’t expect a natural material would be purer than something made in a lab with the explicit goal of making it pure and regular. Structure being regular could be an effect of conditions that we don’t want to pay for in the lab, but the purity is weird. I am sure the explanation (and there is a natural one) is very interesting and might open up some avenues for simpler manufacturing of the material.
What does it matter when something was realized versus its anthropomorphism?
Didn't some guy use a huge rock as a doorstop before someone realized it was gold and worth a lot.
It was gold before it was realized it was gold. What did it's discover matter? It didn't change what it was. The worth as 'gold' is totally superimposed by the humans.
I think the materially, even pure, is strongly colored, so you can't easily determine impurities visually, unlike diamonds and sapphires and other colorless-when-pure minerals.
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.
That's actually a bit wild that Chile isn't refining or smelting copper.
Is it because there's not the energy capacity to run smelters? I thought Chili had a pretty abundant energy grid (mostly hydro as I recall).
Australia behaves the same way, exports ore to China and buys back the refined products. Both countries have abundant energy (hydro and solar) but have old fashioned mining interests in charge.
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These systems aren't in place by accident. The US doesn't typically purchase roasted coffee beans or chocolate bars from South America either.
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I had a Chilean coworker who earned his degree in molecular biology while in Chile. He emigrated to the US (sometime in the early-mid 90's) as he claimed there was little opportunity for scientists in Chile. He worked a basic job that paid the bills while he built up a side business exporting appliances secretly stuffed with gun parts. He was able to retire back to Chile on that money.
You described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Or if you look at the issue more closely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_theory
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".
That isn't the Dutch Disease, it's anti-intellectualism. It is where Pol Pots come from eventually, and it never leads anywhere good.
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I think some of it ties into incrementalism versus "great man" theory. I believe we dramatically underestimate how much of any new thing is (A) not actually as new as it looks and (B) absolutely required a thousand smaller things like precision screws or pure materials.
> 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"
Guess what the other far right president of the region says (Argentina's). Makes me sad.
It's the same for the whole region, friend. Shut up and keep mining, harvesting, or raising these cows for the gringos, ain't no need to get clever about it.
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¿Para que inventar nosotros ? Que ellos ya lo inventan. - A Spanish politician in the first years of XX century to a Spanish inventor working with early radios.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_spin_liquid
Neat
The animation is great though I don't understand how the collapsed singlet can exist in proximity to the superimposed ones. I would expect the presence of the defined spin to create an "observation" of a neighbor and immediately collapse the entire material.
The animation is pretty good and helps to easily understand the phenomenon
And the music that goes along with it is pretty great, too.
Apparently done by this artist? https://laoexperiment.bandcamp.com/album/quantum-magnet-soun...
For real, not what I expect to come across when checking out more in-the-weeds topics. Super accessible, even for a layman like me.
Not a big fan of the music though, sounded like I left another video playing in the background at points.
this looks like those bot comments on youtube videos.
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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-...
At first I thought you were playing the Ad Hominem card there, but reading the article I'm assuming you mean to point out that the author seems like a rather interesting individual.
I like one of the introductory sentences where he says, "I am a strange person who has had a strange life, even relative to that of my strange and high achieving peers here."
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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.
Quantum crystals sound more like something out of a video game than reality
The quest: Recover data stored in the quantum crystal matrix by building a tachyon pulse emitter.
Simple. Just reverse the polarity.
That solves every problem that a warp bubble can't.
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My immediate thought upon seeing the title was Outer Wilds
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.
The vast copper-producing region of the US has large areas of similar mineralization. If they found it in the Atacama then you can find it in the US as well.
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.
It’s gotta be coins though.
Most famous example was Louis XIV who created medals specifically to preserve French history for future archaeologists.
At that time they realized that they knew almost everything about Romans and Greek through preserved medals.
So the King created a vast medal series (Histoire Métallique) intended to outlast paper, books, and buildings.
These bronze and gold medals were intentionally buried in the foundations of monuments like the Louvre, specifically waiting for future generations to excavate them.
So the key is: durable materials, widely spread.
If humanity suddenly died tomorrow the world would be littered with handy rectangular glass pieces all over the world.
Alien archeologists would have a field day figuring out what they were for.
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They’ll last thousands of years, but not millions.
it's more likely that they used our planet as a "greenhouse" to grow these crystals for themselves, and we're just the lichen that happens to grow on the walls as a consequence of their process
I was literally thinking ancient civilizations/aliens throughout the whole article.
It’d need to be really ancient in this case. To the point only mineral traces and no structure would remain.
It is. I wish the conspiracy theorist 'the pyramids could not have been built by humans' etc etc crowds didn't exist, because I wish there was space to theorise about pre-human, pre-ape intelligent culture just for fun.
Same with UFOs. It seems to have changed in the past few years, but for a long time interest in them was associated with wackiness, and it was not something you could really discuss with a genuine sense of interest without the stain of appearing to believe something you didn't. It's intellectually and socially important to be able to be able to be curious and speculate without the appearance of belief in something.
That ol' Silurian Hypothesis is fun, but, knowing how damn smart birds are, it's not inconceivable that the theropods could have become advanced enough to be at least tool-users.
Of course, now, we know they probably had as much similarity to lizards as we do.
Another interesting thought experiment is an octopus civilization. They are probably smart enough to have also developed along those lines.
Depending on what that civilization would have looked like, there might not be much left.
I remember reading an essay (probably linked from here), that it might only take a couple of million years, to completely wipe all traces of even an advanced, mechanized civilization. They posited that the only evidence of our civilization, in a few million years, would be marbles.
6 replies →
Was the sense of wackiness wrong though? Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous. It's useful to play around with ideas, yes, but it's also important to acknowledge that some ideas simply are wishful thinking.
3 replies →
Building the pyramids is the easy part. You need food, labor, stone. Designing the bastards is where the true mystery lies for me. And it doesn't seem that we have very good history on the design process. Unlike the building one.
1 reply →
Or, it's just another spin of the anthropomorphism bias we have. If anyone found those mineral what, 50 years ago? or let's say 150 to predate every quantum theory possibility... well, they would have been just nice and weird crystals with 0 importance, just because we didn't know about their properties.
But now they have suddenly a meaning so hey, maybe it's somebody like us, smart as us, that created them many eons ago to harness quantum capabilities back in the day.
They were in fact discovered 54 years ago. The quantum properties weren’t recognized until 2012.
I think the funniest part is the purity. I wouldn’t expect a natural material would be purer than something made in a lab with the explicit goal of making it pure and regular. Structure being regular could be an effect of conditions that we don’t want to pay for in the lab, but the purity is weird. I am sure the explanation (and there is a natural one) is very interesting and might open up some avenues for simpler manufacturing of the material.
What does it matter when something was realized versus its anthropomorphism?
Didn't some guy use a huge rock as a doorstop before someone realized it was gold and worth a lot.
It was gold before it was realized it was gold. What did it's discover matter? It didn't change what it was. The worth as 'gold' is totally superimposed by the humans.
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Oil
or rather Petroleum
I mean, can an ant tell that a highway or skyscraper is artificial?
From their individual perspectives, it has been there since the beginning of time and will remain there long after they are gone.
”San Francisco mine” - is that a coincidence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator
Ah, vintage VX junkies
Imagine the efficiency gains if you replace prefabulated Amulite with premalleated Herbertsmithite!
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?
I think the materially, even pure, is strongly colored, so you can't easily determine impurities visually, unlike diamonds and sapphires and other colorless-when-pure minerals.
powers the quantum heartbeat detector
new spice unlocked
Was there a DeLorean hidden in the mine nearby?
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> Herbertsmithite
I read "Hilbertschmidte"