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I'm not aware of any predictive power the standard model has over nuclear physics and atomic physics directly. In principle, yes the standard model should be ab
by morbia 4y ago
I'm not aware of any predictive power the standard model has over nuclear physics and atomic physics directly. In principle, yes the standard model should be able to predict things at those energy scales, in practice no one has a clue how.
To use a more relatable analogy, it's a bit like using quantum mechanics to build a skyscraper. In principle it should be possible, it practice it is incalculable. Newtonian physics does the job fine in that scenario.
- peteradio 4y agoIf you wanted to build a skyscraper taking into account quantum mechanics then maybe you are hoping to induce a scaled quantum mechanic effect? Perhaps in the ultra-modern evolution of buildings the structure of the building itself will have a communication aspect associated with its natural largess and to accomplish this quantum mechanics is used to derive the appropriate building structure. Just because it sounds far-fetched or hard doesn't mean it won't be humdrum engineering decades or a century in the future. It all starts somewhere.
- snovv_crash 4y agoYou use the quantum mechanics to design the graphene conformation that yield the best loads, and then infuse the concrete in your skyscraper with the graphene. Everything needs abstraction layers otherwise of course the complexity becomes mindboggling.
- dangerlibrary 4y agoAs I understand it, this is not really how most practical materials research is done today. Bridging the "scale gap" between nano-scale research, micro-scale research, etc. up to something the size of a foundation for a skyscraper is very hard (read: almost impossible) right now. Those nano-scale research areas are pretty siloed and only in extreme cases like transistor manufacturing is there any meaningful overlap with production use cases. In general, materials researchers for something like concrete are going to be better off exploring the (very large!) high dimensional space of possible formulations of existing concrete ingredients and pushing out the pareto frontier for the best possible concrete that way. Also, one probably shouldn't be using bleeding-edge concrete tech for a skyscraper foundation - in a safety critical application like that you just build it 1.2x bigger than you need and it'll still be much cheaper and safer than a process like what you just described. Materials research is super interesting, though, even if it's not building up from quantum-particle scale research. And atomic / molecular features of inputs can yield interesting material candidates. Source: I work (as a software dev, not a materials researcher) at Citrine Informatics, selling software to assist companies who are trying to do practical materials things like make better concrete.
- marcosdumay 4y agoYour metaphor simply doesn't reflect the reality. Material sciences, condensed matter physics, chemistry and etc work up from the abstraction layer of "atoms". It's a quite well defined and relevant layer. So, until that work brings some different configuration¹ for atoms, they will have no impact at all. 1 - It doesn't need to be as new elements, but even for the resonance between the nucleus and electrosphere they didn't create anything new, and only things affecting the electrosphere matter. (Even then, they didn't create anything new on a nucleus either.)