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The tangent on manipulating Titanium in order to prepare it for the beam was more interesting to me, and IMHO sounds like a much more practical and potentially
by beerandt 2y ago
The tangent on manipulating Titanium in order to prepare it for the beam was more interesting to me, and IMHO sounds like a much more practical and potentially useful bit of knowledge coming from this.
Titanium is a pita to work with.
But also... the 'island of stability' is fascinating, and I think we have to assume that we don't know enough about the Strong Force until we either prove it exists and is reachable, or doesn't/isn't.
- pfdietz 2y agoThe problem with the strong force is that it doesn't have some nice tidy description, like the inverse square law for the electrostatic force. It's spin dependent, and not just involving interactions of pairs of nucleons. There are at least three-nucleon terms in the potential. It looks like something accidental, not elegant or designed. It just "happens" to give stable nuclei that end up allowing something like us to have come into existence. I get the feeling of anthropic effects on display.
- jcghgxt 2y agoI don't get this. Do nucleons bind and hold together because of the strong force or gravity? I thought strong force only keeps quarks together via gluon exchange
- pfdietz 2y agoNucleons in nuclei are bound by the strong force. It's (vaguely) analogous to the way the electromagnetic force still binds neutral molecules together (van der Waals force). At the scale of the nucleus, gravity is many, MANY orders of magnitude weaker.