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The existence of a new kind of magnet has been confirmed
- nonrandomstring 3y agoWhatever happened to "bubble memory"? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory
- wk_end 3y agoYour own link tells you! The introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips pushed bubble into the slow end of the scale, and equally dramatic improvements in hard-drive capacity made it uncompetitive in price terms.[1] Bubble memory was used for some time in the 1970s and 1980s in applications where its non-moving nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The introduction of flash storage and similar technologies rendered even this niche uncompetitive, and bubble disappeared entirely by the late 1980s.
- masspro 3y agoThere was a Konami arcade cabinet that (tried to) use bubble memory! It was considered a failure. Also from Wikipedia[0]: > It was considerably more expensive than ROM chip-based boards and extremely sensitive to electromagnetic fields that could render the game unplayable. You can find the start-up sequence of these on YouTube. It’s pretty…idiosyncratic. It took forever because it had to physically warm the memory up. Though I guess taking forever is irrelevant if you are turning on a machine only once in the morning. In fact, the music in the ROM it plays while starting up was named “Morning Music”. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_System
- nonrandomstring 3y agoAmazing. I never realised it got to commercial production, just that about 1985 it was heralded as the next amazing thing - with however many libraries of congress per fingernail etc.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> with however many libraries of congress per fingernail etc. That's a bold claim! I found a NASA document from 1976 that expected bubble memory to reach about a terabit per cubic meter by the year 2000. And then you need over a hundred terabits for a library of congress. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42884743.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42884743.pdf
- mewpmewp2 3y agoLikely ruined by the reputation of bubble sort.
- m463 3y agowent the way of the stringy floppy
- Aardwolf 3y agoAlso, MRAM, PRAM and FeRAM
- the8472 3y agoMRAM is available as a niche product, it just hasn't achieved the promise of being cheap and dense as dram, fast as sram, nonvolatile and higher write endurance than flash at the same time. It ticks maybe two or three of those boxes, which is still something.
- pugworthy 3y agoMagnets - We thought we knew how they worked.
- dingusdew 3y ago[dead]
- adamhartenz 3y agoAnyone who claims they know how magnets work, are a liar
- archgoon 3y agoStrong words. Why do you believe no one knows how magnets work? What would be a satisfactory answer?
- blix 3y agoI believe GP is a riff on the common joke among physicists: "Anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics is either lying or crazy." To be more specific in the case of magenetism, you can say that, for example, ferromagnetism arises from the alignment of magnetic moments into cohesive domains, where the individual magenetic moments arise on the atomic level from unpaired electrons in the d or f orbitals. But if you poke at that (incomplete) answer a little bit, things start to get complicated. How exactly do magnetic domains align? What if there's a disruption in crystal structure? Are there other sources of magnetic moments? Where does the magnetic moment on an elementary particle come from? The answers to these questions get pretty complicated and questions like these motivate a lot of active scientific research.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- fsckboy 3y agowe don't know why or how there is electric charge (and their related fields), we just know that there is electric charge; it's one of the properties of the universe; same with gravity. We have uncovered mathematical laws of charge and and their relationship (via div, grad, curl and all that) to magnetic fields, but we don't know how or why, just what is. My source is Feynman.
- altruios 3y agoarticle limit paywall: any workaround?
- davideg 3y agohttps://archive.is/m1qfh https://archive.is/m1qfh
- gary_0 3y agoThis works for me: https://web.archive.org/web/20240215162623/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2417255-the-existence-of-a-new-kind-of-magnetism-has-been-confirmed/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240215162623/https://www.newsc...
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- tech_ken 3y ago[flagged]
- SequoiaHope 3y agoHere's a nice non-paywalled article on this: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-experimentally.html https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-experimentally....
- mysterydip 3y ago[flagged]
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- Rapzid 3y ago[flagged]
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- Rapzid 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't do this here.
- Rapzid 3y agoEh, let the community sort it.
- dang 3y agoI wish it were possible - it would be so much less work - but the community can't self-regulate that way. It has too many failure modes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20failure%20modes&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- Rapzid 3y agoMy apologies. I was "referencing Tupac" ;) AKA being a jackass. I'll do better.
- Nevermark 3y agoSpintronics, which these magnets might be useful for, have several potential advantages for low power, speed and quantum coherence for quantum computing. So a very nice discovery. Love how we keep finding strange new useful modes of matter at “the bottom”. Computing substrates are far from reaching any kind of final form or limit.
- angiosperm 3y agoI thought we had long since established that magnetism is illusory, an artifact of special relativity. But it seems like a thin film of this stuff would be a good thing to skim an electron beam over, if you wanted some extremely short-waved photons.
- pdonis 3y agoIt's not illusory or an "artifact", since you can have electromagnetic field configurations that cannot be reduced to simple electrostatics (i.e., electric field but zero magnetic field) by picking an appropriate frame. Special relativity helps to explain why, even if you have a configuration that is purely electrostatic in one frame, it won't be purely electrostatic in other frames. But that's not the same as saying that all electromagnetic field configurations are that way. They aren't.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoThe magnetic field may be an artifact of special relativity. Magnetic materials are not relativistic artifacts.
- chasil 3y agoThe electromagnetic force is one of the four fundamental forces. It cannot be reduced. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction
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- ithkuil 3y agoI think GP alluded to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality_(electricity_and_magnetism) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality_(electricity_and_mag...
- lupire 3y agoWhy isn't electricity an illusory artifact of relativistic magnetism?
- pdonis 3y agoThe article's title is misleading: they actually mean a new kind of permanent magnet (that was theoretically predicted but hadn't been observed until now), not a new kind of magnetism (as in, something not predicted or accounted for by our existing theory of electromagnetism).
- dang 3y agoOk, we've downgraded magnetism to just a magnet in the title above. Thanks!
- nhatcher 3y agoIf I am reading correctly it is a new kind of magnetism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetism#Types https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetism#Types And I am not sure it can be called a magnet. It's definitely a new kind of magnetic state
- pdonis 3y ago> it is a new kind of magnetism It's a new kind of magnetic medium that had not been previously observed. It is not something that can't be explained by our existing theory of electromagnetism. > I am not sure it can be called a magnet. It's an object that has magnetic properties. That's a magnet. It's a different kind of magnet from those we had previously observed.
- lupire 3y agoEach magnetic medium exhibits its own kind of magnetism. Sometimes words are slightly ambiguous. This is not a hill to die on.
- pdonis 3y ago> Each magnetic medium exhibits its own kind of magnetism. I agree that it is sometimes described this way, although as one commenter upthread said, such use of language is more common when physicists are talking among themselves, not when they are talking to the public. The comments in this discussion indicate that I am by no means the only one who was confused by the original wording. So I think the change was helpful.
- _obviously 3y agoSpintronic effects is how Saturn is a natural, planet-sized computer.
- CarRamrod 3y ago>OK Saturn, play Thick As A Brick on Earth at 100% volume
- demondemidi 3y agoIs that from a book? I’d like to read it if so.
- tempodox 3y agoIt's from Jethro Tull.
- demondemidi 3y agoI know that album inside and out. What is the Saturn reference and how does it relate?
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- rashkov 3y agoGo on…
- DeathArrow 3y agoSo in the future Arm vs x86 flame wars will be replaced by spintronic vs quantum vs carbon vs optical computers flame wars.
- interludead 3y ago[dead]
- doublerabbit 3y agoDoes this enable hover-boot, hover-tech capabilities yet?