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Comment by darkwater

18 hours ago

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.

6 comments

darkwater

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jameshart  18 hours ago

They were in fact discovered 54 years ago. The quantum properties weren’t recognized until 2012.

rbanffy  13 hours ago

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.

  • abreidenbach  4 hours ago

    Yeah, I’m hoping to replicate the higher purity natural growth pathway in synthetics. The bottom line is higher purity means more zinc for us, and it’s a common enough ion in the earth’s crust. This mine in particular has a lot of Zn dense minerals, so there’s just a lot of zinc here. Most natural crystals might be less pure, but it grows so commonly in nature, it’s less surprising that some are more pure from that perspective

FrustratedMonky  17 hours ago

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.

  • darkwater  12 hours ago

    It means that if you remove the meaning humans give to to, it's much easier to explain it as a coincidence, something that is produced naturally and it just happens to have the right property (for any value of property).