#solid state physics

[cassieon]

My favorite chapter: The Four Elements, from The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life by Felix Flicker.

The way Felix Flicker begins each chapter with a storybook like passage draws me deeper into every discussion. I have always appreciated whimsical creativity, but it doesn’t often merge with the sciences, at least not in this way. This book contains meaningful discussions and explanations of condensed matter physics, from fundamental topics like the states of matter and phase transitions to spin ice and quantum field theory.

Felix presents physics not just as a magical science, but as magic itself. He refers to physics as a “modern name for magic”, to theories as “spells”, to physicists as “wizards”; Throughout the book, he manages to explain each topic in depth to stimulate the scientific mind, while also leaning into the fantastical.

This magical interpretation serves to both enchant and prepare the reader for the chapters to come, with each building on the last. This is truly one of my favorite books, for many many reasons.

Below is the very beginning of chapter two, a captivating prologue to emergence.

One day, Lady Long-Ears and Mister Calabash were beating olives from a tree. A swarm of mayflies surrounded them. Mister Calabash said: “Have you ever considered that these mayflies spend their entire lives with us, Long-Ears? We arrive at our work at dawn. By our morning tea break they are born, by our afternoon lunch break they are middle-aged, and by the time we walk home down the mountain they are dead. The lucky ones mated, but many more pass their brief and meaningless lives unnoticed, proving at most an occasional annoyance to us at our work.”

Long-Ears replied: “Their lives are no more meaningless than yours or mine. Consider this olive tree, for example. It sprouted in the time of our long-forgotten ancestors. By the time it had matured, many generations of our families had lived and died. When its time is up, you and I will have passed into obscurity.”

To this the olive tree added: “Further to your point, you two will have proven little but an occasional annoyance to me, too.

“The first people to find me left me alone. Their children’s children ate my fruit “and found them disgusting. Their grandchildren learned to salt those fruit. Since then I’ve been picked at incessantly. It was only another hundred years or so before you started growing my offspring, down there. Another generation and you were watering them properly, although not as properly as this mountain waters me.”

The mountain joined in: “I should think not.”

“Your observations, olive tree, are insufficient. To me you are all insignificant. Tree, I have watched animals evolve over countless generations to eat your fruit, just as I watched your species evolve to use the animals.

“In my youth I came from the sea and watched continents collide. As I matured I watched species come and go. To me, your entire species are mere fleeting specks. I live on the timescale of our entire planet, and understand that of the universe itself.”

The universe felt compelled to join the discussion at this point.

“Mountain, you speak of understanding my timescale, but you do not grasp that I have no such thing. I stretch long into your future and long into your past, but I also inhabit every event in between. You see the species on you come and go, but “the generations are of so little consequence to you that you cannot discern them.

“Tree, I enjoy your set of events immensely. You too are proud in your way. You see the generations of the likes of Long-Ears and Calabash, but they themselves provide you with only a fleeting glimpse of their existence.

“Mister Calabash, you claim the mayflies’ entire lives are insignificant compared to a single uneventful day of your own. Perhaps you would consider the following.

“You are all correct and all incorrect, as am I. My true nature cannot be conveyed, but I will give a crude approximation. I join each of you on your timescales, but I also contain every other event that has been and which ever will be. In your understanding, these things are happening together.

“I contain the annihilation of particles so short-lived they cannot truly be said to have existed at all, and others which exist forever without ever meeting another thing. I contain the mayflies living out their days and the planets living out theirs, and all these things are both absolutely significant and completely pointless.”

With that, Mister Calabash took back his comments about mayflies and went home and had a good hard think about what he was going to eat that evening.

[dat-physics-gal]

Try telling that to solid state physicists.

(To my kindergarten class) It is easier to imagine an absence opening in a presence than a presence originating in an absence. Thus to answer your question, the holes in the swiss cheese must come after the cheese is formed, and it is not the case that the cheese is formed around the holes.

[dandelions-in-the-rain]

I'm trying to study the derivation for density of states but its just dE dk E D(E) repeated in some form or another and i cant remember what goes where.... send help

[yoccu]

A year ago I would have laughed in your FACE if you told me after a year I’d be so eager to draw I’d be struggling to find ways to CONVINCE myself NOT to draw for a single day

Life’s funny!

[kjzx]

I'm lowkey terrified to date for many reasons but one of them is that I'm afraid that lesbian/bi women irl are just like what I see online and if I was exposed to this stuff irl I'd just kms methinks

[melhadi74]

The fact liquids exist as a whole is so insane, they require insanely specific conditions to exist. Matter of fact, most matter in the universe is either a gas, plasma or a solid.

[morganhopesmith1996]

Added this beauty to the collection today! 😍

[rebeccaistrans]

We have reached the condensed matter brainrot portion of exam revision 🥲

[intrinsically-disordered-proxein]

[enclarice]

Happy Halloween, from Kaolin of porcelain and Ichi of the 4th dimension !

Also...

Last year's art , Happy Halloween from Syringa the shifter and Ampersand the hedgehog!

[coconut530]

SAY IT WITH ME: EXTREMELY BAD TECH CULT 💛🥺⌚️🩸🖤

[dandelions-in-the-rain]

"Quasiparticles are annihilated in a process called recombination. " ... calm down Snoke, this isn't Star Trek

[vaishu1126]

Top 100 Important Solid State Physics IIT JAM Questions for Preparation - L 4

[platypusisnotonfire]

This is exactly what I want my future hypothetical family to be. This is what I will pass down to my children.

my family is fucking addicted to macgyvering and it's becoming a problem. every time something in this house breaks, instead of doing the sensible thing of replacing it or calling someone qualified to fix it, we all group around the offending object with a manic look in our eyes and everyone gets a try at fixing it while being cheered on or ridiculed by the rest.

it's a beautiful bonding activity, but the "creative" fixes have turned our house into a quasihaunted escape room like contraption where everything works, but only in the wonkiest of ways. you need a huge block of iron to turn on the stove. the oven only works if a specific clock is plugged in. the bread machine has a huge wood block just stapled to it that has become foundational to its function. sometimes when you use the toaster the doorbell rings. and that's just the kitchen.

it's all fun and games until you have guests over and you have to lay out the rules of the house like it's a fucking board game. welcome to the beautiful guest room. don't pull out the couch yourself you need a screwdriver for that, and that metal rod makes the lamp work so don't move it. it also made me a terrifying roommate in college, because it makes me think i can fix anything with enough hubris and a drill. you want to call the landlord about a leaky faucet? as if. one time my dad made me install a new power socket because we ran our of extension cords

[literallymechanical]

Okay so a guy in my solid state physics class was telling us about this muon scanning startup he worked at, GScan, and I'm going insane. I don't work there and I have no stake in the company, financial or otherwise, I just need to tell you about it.

Muons are short-lived subatomic particles, same charge as an electron but ~200 times more massive. On Earth, they're produced by cosmic rays colliding with the upper atmosphere, and they hit the ground at a rate of about ten thousand per minute per square meter.

They're moving extremely fast at ground level, like 0.99 c. So they careen right through matter, deflecting only very slightly around heavy atomic nuclei – they'll penetrate like a hundred meters into solid rock.

What do you do with this continuous shower of deep-penetrating charged particles, constantly blanketing every square inch of the Earth's surface?

(source)

The classic thing is use them to image the inside of massive structures, like we use x-rays to look inside living tissue – except instead of generating them yourself, you just use atmospheric muons. Muon archeology is a whole thing, they've used it to find hidden chambers in pyramids and stuff. Neat!

But this one Estonian company is doing some crazy bullshit and I love it.

Sandwich anything between a pair of portable muon detectors and get full 3D imaging of the interior, with sub-millimeter accuracy, by tracking the minute deflection of muons between them. Samples that are WAY too thick for x-rays, made of literally anything. Just put some muon detectors on some two by fours in a warehouse and call it a day.

You can just. Image anything??? Anything you want?? Completely passively!! Just detectors! No particle source! Put them anywhere. The detectors themselves are a mature technology, the company's tech is in the algorithms they use to get this level of spatial and elemental resolution.

You can detect failures inside cable-reinforced concrete bridges without cutting open the bridges.

Decommissioned Soviet nuclear submarine filled with concrete, with no drawings or documentation, that may or may not have spent fuel canisters in it? And you need to cut it up for storage? Just look at the muons.

One of the wackiest ideas is to put one detector under your bed and one on the ceiling, so you get a full 3D scan of your body every night, passively. I want one.

[prokopetz]

I want owned physical media back, but I'm not sad to see DVDs go – optical media was always a transitional technology, and suffers from a number of intractable drawbacks. I want them to start selling movies on indestructible solid-state cartridges the size of a quarter, so I can keep my entire media collection in an unsorted pile in a random cabinet drawer and have to go rummaging through it like an amateur chef trying to find the lemon zester every single time I want to watch something. Do you understand? I want to lose the entire Star Wars trilogy between my couch cushions.