This seems more of inertia, Newton's first law. "An object at rest stays at rest,...". What comes to mind say there is some threshold acceleration (e.g. or at extreme, accelerate to c within some short time, t), then essentially you have a body at rest and breaks at the weakest point. Interesting would be seeing this effect with varying viscosity.
immmmmm 13 hours ago [-]
> a project in collaboration with the oil and gas company Exxon Mobil
I find it a bit dark that, at a time people, crops, forests and biomes are dying due to extreme heat caused by the fossil fuel industry’s reckless behaviour the last 50 years, the said fossil fuel industry funds research on exotic rheology.
godwinson__4-8 12 hours ago [-]
This is the same company whose research funding was among the first to produce forecasts of these affects. Yet that didn't stop them.
Oh yes, they had some of the best climate scientists back then.
It’s somewhat a scale up of what the tobacco industry did, same strategies, etc
chicken-stew 10 hours ago [-]
of what the tobacco industry did
They’re still very active, pushing new avenues that are (pinky swear) not detrimental for your health.
MengerSponge 13 hours ago [-]
They care about rheology because that expertise enables fracking, and they're smart enough to understand that you have to fund basic science to get (valuable) applied science.
immmmmm 12 hours ago [-]
I have worked half of my life in both fundamental and applied science, I know how this work. In particular you can refuse jobs you deem unethical.
Why not funding energy transition research for instance. It’s know to science for half a century we’ll cook to death if we don’t phase out fossil fuel energy.
And by know, I mean there’s literally millions of papers on the topic.
HPsquared 7 hours ago [-]
For my own small country, I'd rather we worked on how to adapt ourselves to the inevitable climate change that is coming, which we can't stop.
immmmmm 6 hours ago [-]
Adaptation is not an alternative for mitigation. We have to do adaptation AND mitigation (drastic reduction of emissions).
We can stop CC, science is very clear on this.
thorncorona 13 hours ago [-]
well unless you figure out how to replace plastic..
autoexec 12 hours ago [-]
We could replace a large number of plastics right now and be just fine. Society flourished and thrived before we used plastic for everything in our lives. Some people would make less profit though, so of course it's impossible to make those kinds of changes, but we could.
kulahan 12 hours ago [-]
Society flourished without lots of stuff we have today. It just flourished less.
And people aren’t failing to migrate away from plastic because “somebody would make less money”, they’re using plastic because everything else basically sucks in comparison. It’s tough, cheap, light, stable, easy to shape, doesn’t often break dangerously, can have all of its basic properties modified, and more. Nothing else is THAT good.
Edit: Not to mention, it’s not as simple as “don’t use plastic packaging anymore”. We pull oil into a machine and cook it off at various stages to produce various things. Turning cooking stage 8 of 12 into a worthless pile of garbage to be discarded doesn’t stop us from pulling in that oil for the other 11 uses.
kevin_thibedeau 2 hours ago [-]
Waxed paper was fine for a lot of food wrappers until the penny pinchers abandoned it.
Asmod4n 11 hours ago [-]
All we need to do is to replace all plastics with bio degradable ones. But I guess that will take some time since we don’t have replacements for all petroleum based plastics yet.
Hopefully this will get us recycling friendly plastics for foods in the long run since those just get burned nowadays cause you can’t recycle those we have today for that job.
nervousvarun 7 hours ago [-]
Agreed but for it to happen implies altruistic, non-profit based corporate decision making R&D & subsequent manufacturing etc.
No doubt the innumerable shareholder overlords out there who place the basic good of humanity over profit are pushing for it as we speak!
computomatic 12 hours ago [-]
Well, the mainstream adoption of plastics following World War II happens to coincide with an unprecedented period of relative global stability known as the “Long Peace.” So there’s at least some version of “thriving” that was, in fact, not previously achieved. Correlation does not imply causation but in this case it’s difficult to disentangle which innovations have lead to the relative global prosperity that has enabled this, and I think plastics are on the shortlist.
ozlikethewizard 7 hours ago [-]
The classic US take on global peace, ask the Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, etc, how they feel about the long peace?
Moreover, pretty sure it was nuclear weapons, not plastic, that stopped the imperial powers from directly attacking one another.
fodkodrasz 12 hours ago [-]
You are mistaking plastics for the MAD doctrine, and nuclear weapons.
dzhiurgis 6 hours ago [-]
The disease is consumerism, not industry. As long as there is demand - there will be supply. AFAIK no people weaned themselves off fossil fuels yet. Even basics haven’t been solved yet in most parts.
mjevans 3 hours ago [-]
At scale that is never going to happen.
Stop even thinking of conservation, start thinking of how to produce the desired effects using alternate sources and then apply regulation to move to those sources.
Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, nuclear of any sort that's safer than coal or oil? Build it ALL.
Inexpensive energy is the cornerstone of advancing quality of life.
aaron695 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dataflow 12 hours ago [-]
Second comment for a semi-off-topic question: does the state of matter depend on the gravity?
Thought-experiment: take any solid, put it in an infinitely strong cup, and crank up gravity. At some point gravity overwhelms the forces holding the substance together and thus the substance ends up breaking apart and.. filling the cup just like a liquid, no?
Does everything become liquid-like at sufficiently high gravity? How does one distinguish what's a solid or a liquid when gravity seems to make them behave similarly?
rcxdude 2 hours ago [-]
A solid will put up some resistance to shear forces, up to the plastic limit. A liquid gives zero resistance to a constant shear force after enough time. What this means is that a solid might approximate a sphere but it will still at the limit have some level of roughness (even with something as extreme as a neutron star), while a liquid will in principle always move towards a perfect sphere under gravity alone.
If you put a cup of water in a strong enough gravity, lower part of the cup will have higher pressure, and that part will turn to unusual ice types. While top of the cup will remain liquid. Cranking up a gravity will only change the ratio. This is why people use pressure instead of gravity, pressure is what defines the state.
Your main point is something like "material becomes weak compared to gravity, conforms to the cup, as if liquid", or "cant have long range structure". But we already have solids that are like that - sand. Sand doesnt resist change to its shape, it just slides in a new position. And yet we still consider sand to be solid. Angle of a pile in particular.
Even a neutron star likely has surface level irregularities on a scale of centimiters. While a liquid can flow to submicron level smoothness even in a diy experiment.
Material gets stronger as pressure is increased. Unusual crystal structure becomes available. Superconductors and some other weird properties can exist only when crystal structure is compressed. And this tendency continues all the way to degenerate matter, as in neutron stars. Material from inside of a neutron star is likely the strongest a material can be in this universe.
So in the end, "solidness" continues to fight back, presenting enough properties to differentiate it from a true liquid, even if it could look somewhat similar, "shallow pile of material", all the way to degenerate matter of neutron stars.
dataflow 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting, thanks!
6 hours ago [-]
madaxe_again 12 hours ago [-]
It really depends on what’s in your cup at relatively low gs - some things will deform, others will brittle fracture, others yet will just stubbornly sit there, but if you keep on cranking that gravity dial you’ll get degenerate matter, which behaves quite a bit like a liquid.
dd8601fn 15 hours ago [-]
This looks like silly putty behavior.
jdlshore 14 hours ago [-]
Oobleck (corn starch and water) will do this too. But presumably they already knew that. The article describes it as being known to happen in “complex fluids,” but that it was news that it happens in “simple fluids.” Presumably silly putty and oobleck are “complex fluids?”
EA-3167 13 hours ago [-]
Specifically they're the subtype of non-Newtonian fluids, and it's also a colloid, and certainly is very elastic.
nelox 13 hours ago [-]
Turns out glass has been known to be a fluid and to fracture for quite some time.
[edit: but glass is not a simple fluid.]
helltone 13 hours ago [-]
I thought glass was a solid?
evaneykelen 12 hours ago [-]
I lived in a house built around 1605 in the Netherlands, with some of the windows being hundreds of years old, based on expert opinion. The glass had started to droop downward in certain places, almost like the resin you see in trees. It made me realize that glass is not as rigid as I thought.
scheme271 11 hours ago [-]
I think that glass flowing thing is a myth. The manufacturing method back then resulted in uneven panes and they were installed with the thicker side at the bottom.
mjevans 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not entirely convinced it is a myth, but the practical effect surely is.
I do suspect that over insanely long periods an otherwise undisturbed physical object would flow-sag at some rate under the influence of a constant force in a given direction.
No idea how long that would take, but erosion and other destructive forces appear to dominate so for practical measures any such effect is likely against the noise floor.
Eji1700 13 hours ago [-]
It's an amorphous solid last time I dove into this.
The "well it's technically a liquid!" because it "flows" is really not telling the whole story. Like most science, it's just more complex than can be quickly summarized with one sentence, and doesn't quite map to just high school simplifications.
vlovich123 13 hours ago [-]
Nope, lots of fluids that just flow over such a long period they appear solid.
vlovich123 13 hours ago [-]
Not sure why klustregrif got flagged - the answer was informative and correct.
What I said is true but not for glass. Pitch is a liquid even though it feels like a solid and shatters when smashed.
bonesss 13 hours ago [-]
That ‘long period’ can be many billions of years, glass is an amorphous solid.
klustregrif 13 hours ago [-]
That’s a misconception. Glass does not flow over time; it is a rigid, amorphous solid.
The uneven thickness seen in old cathedral windows is a result of historical manufacturing. Glass was spun into discs that naturally became thicker at the edges, and builders installed the heavier side at the bottom for stability. Physicists calculate that it would take longer than the age of the universe for room-temperature window glass to visibly deform under gravity.
Reference: Zanotto, E. D. (1998). "Do cathedral glasses flow?" American Journal of Physics, https://doi.org/10.1119/1.19026
autoexec 12 hours ago [-]
> That’s a misconception. Glass does not flow over time;...Physicists calculate that it would take longer than the age of the universe for room-temperature window glass to visibly deform under gravity.
so then it does flow over time, just not on a scale where it matters to us.
rsfern 6 hours ago [-]
But this is true for lots of solids, not just glass. Consider creep deformation [0] which is deformation mediated by diffusion of defects in solid materials. It’s a big problem in metal turbine blades, it limits the maximum usable temperature to well below the melting point.
The physical mechanism would be similar in glass flowing in this way, so I don’t think evidence of glass flowing like this should make us think of it as a liquid instead of an amorphous solid
If something is a fluid... or at least a liquid... that means it... flows, right?
Flow speed isn't infinite, so whenever you pull apart a liquid, you'll see some remnant of the pre-flow state. The thicker the liquid, the slower you need to pull it apart to see that.
Is this surprising? Why wouldn't every liquid do this? In what way is this somehow special to some liquids and not others?
dataflow 2 hours ago [-]
Another issue I don't see how to solve is: how do you even gather the data?
That is: how do you even know if someone (a) is doing the same job as a graduate of your program would do, (b) actually skipped a program or its equivalent, and (c) is making more than a graduate of your program?
All of these are personal and private information. If I apply to a startup tomorrow and get hired without listing my engineering degree on my resume, then are they supposed to add me to some national database of uneducated engineers, list my compensation, and explain that they would've hired a graduate for the same role too? If I apply to another company and list my degree then is that gonna overwrite the database? How the heck would this actually work?
madaxe_again 12 hours ago [-]
Your intuition is correct, and what you’re describing is cavitation - which the article goes on to mumble about a little. Honestly, I am also struggling to see what the novel result here is. You can snap off a drip of pitch by pulling on it - if you shear it, it will probably just bend - yank on the droplet and it comes off with a satisfying snap.
But then again I suppose if you lead a cosseted life, never played with the contents of a shed, and had your first practical experience of actual hands on behaviour of viscous liquids in a lab… you might shout “Eureka”.
chupasaurus 10 hours ago [-]
Pitch is a viscoelastic polymer while simple fluids are non-elastic, that's the whole point.
kulahan 12 hours ago [-]
Cavitation can be another “out” for that energy.
brador 13 hours ago [-]
Should be called semi-rigid fluids. They have a structure, it’s just weak and breaks at weak points as you would expect.
animanoir 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nycdweller349 15 hours ago [-]
Someone tell me the industries that are going to benefit the most from this in the short and long term and what I can expect to see in the next 30 years as a result of this discovery.
JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago [-]
It’s a new, generalizable material-science property at STP. Those almost always find practical uses.
(Off the top of my head, a material that dissipates tension below a certain rate but fails when it is applied faster than that rate seems to resemble a mechanical breaker. As in not an electrical breaker that works mechanically. But one that decouples when you pull on it super hard. Being able to do that in fluids means one can potentially do that at very tiny scales.
More broadly, if simple fluids have a quasi-elastic mode, that has fundamental implications for hydrodynamics. I'd be super curious to know, for example, if anything similar to this occurs in air or water.)
helpfulclippy 15 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a lot of work for someone to go do for a quanta article about something neat a researcher noticed.
calrt 15 hours ago [-]
I worry that this sort of request will become the norm in the age of AI where people forget that people aren’t there to serve them.
Maybe it will not have any mmediate application. But guess what? It's still cool! And that can be its very own reward if you let it.
Oh, btw: electricity was a novelty toy for several long decades with no major practical applications. But that eventually changed because people kept researching it. And it changed the world.
labbeth 13 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm wrong or too naive... but isn't it related to "cavitation"?
dgoldstein0 12 hours ago [-]
From reading the article, it does sound like that's a top hypothesis. Pulled fast enough, a bubble from cavitation can form and serve as the nucleation site of the crack
lostlogin 15 hours ago [-]
You made an account to say that?
rixed 12 hours ago [-]
He made an account to add an offensive comment that would make many infuriated HNers engage with, thus improving the rank for the article?
lstodd 14 hours ago [-]
he had his llm to make an account to post this.
DeluluDon 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
15 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 18:28:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I find it a bit dark that, at a time people, crops, forests and biomes are dying due to extreme heat caused by the fossil fuel industry’s reckless behaviour the last 50 years, the said fossil fuel industry funds research on exotic rheology.
Can't get more "dark" than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
It’s somewhat a scale up of what the tobacco industry did, same strategies, etc
Why not funding energy transition research for instance. It’s know to science for half a century we’ll cook to death if we don’t phase out fossil fuel energy.
And by know, I mean there’s literally millions of papers on the topic.
We can stop CC, science is very clear on this.
And people aren’t failing to migrate away from plastic because “somebody would make less money”, they’re using plastic because everything else basically sucks in comparison. It’s tough, cheap, light, stable, easy to shape, doesn’t often break dangerously, can have all of its basic properties modified, and more. Nothing else is THAT good.
Edit: Not to mention, it’s not as simple as “don’t use plastic packaging anymore”. We pull oil into a machine and cook it off at various stages to produce various things. Turning cooking stage 8 of 12 into a worthless pile of garbage to be discarded doesn’t stop us from pulling in that oil for the other 11 uses.
Hopefully this will get us recycling friendly plastics for foods in the long run since those just get burned nowadays cause you can’t recycle those we have today for that job.
No doubt the innumerable shareholder overlords out there who place the basic good of humanity over profit are pushing for it as we speak!
Moreover, pretty sure it was nuclear weapons, not plastic, that stopped the imperial powers from directly attacking one another.
Stop even thinking of conservation, start thinking of how to produce the desired effects using alternate sources and then apply regulation to move to those sources.
Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, nuclear of any sort that's safer than coal or oil? Build it ALL.
Inexpensive energy is the cornerstone of advancing quality of life.
Thought-experiment: take any solid, put it in an infinitely strong cup, and crank up gravity. At some point gravity overwhelms the forces holding the substance together and thus the substance ends up breaking apart and.. filling the cup just like a liquid, no?
Does everything become liquid-like at sufficiently high gravity? How does one distinguish what's a solid or a liquid when gravity seems to make them behave similarly?
If you put a cup of water in a strong enough gravity, lower part of the cup will have higher pressure, and that part will turn to unusual ice types. While top of the cup will remain liquid. Cranking up a gravity will only change the ratio. This is why people use pressure instead of gravity, pressure is what defines the state.
Your main point is something like "material becomes weak compared to gravity, conforms to the cup, as if liquid", or "cant have long range structure". But we already have solids that are like that - sand. Sand doesnt resist change to its shape, it just slides in a new position. And yet we still consider sand to be solid. Angle of a pile in particular.
Even a neutron star likely has surface level irregularities on a scale of centimiters. While a liquid can flow to submicron level smoothness even in a diy experiment.
Material gets stronger as pressure is increased. Unusual crystal structure becomes available. Superconductors and some other weird properties can exist only when crystal structure is compressed. And this tendency continues all the way to degenerate matter, as in neutron stars. Material from inside of a neutron star is likely the strongest a material can be in this universe.
So in the end, "solidness" continues to fight back, presenting enough properties to differentiate it from a true liquid, even if it could look somewhat similar, "shallow pile of material", all the way to degenerate matter of neutron stars.
[edit: but glass is not a simple fluid.]
I do suspect that over insanely long periods an otherwise undisturbed physical object would flow-sag at some rate under the influence of a constant force in a given direction.
No idea how long that would take, but erosion and other destructive forces appear to dominate so for practical measures any such effect is likely against the noise floor.
The "well it's technically a liquid!" because it "flows" is really not telling the whole story. Like most science, it's just more complex than can be quickly summarized with one sentence, and doesn't quite map to just high school simplifications.
What I said is true but not for glass. Pitch is a liquid even though it feels like a solid and shatters when smashed.
so then it does flow over time, just not on a scale where it matters to us.
The physical mechanism would be similar in glass flowing in this way, so I don’t think evidence of glass flowing like this should make us think of it as a liquid instead of an amorphous solid
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creep_(deformation)
If something is a fluid... or at least a liquid... that means it... flows, right?
Flow speed isn't infinite, so whenever you pull apart a liquid, you'll see some remnant of the pre-flow state. The thicker the liquid, the slower you need to pull it apart to see that.
Is this surprising? Why wouldn't every liquid do this? In what way is this somehow special to some liquids and not others?
That is: how do you even know if someone (a) is doing the same job as a graduate of your program would do, (b) actually skipped a program or its equivalent, and (c) is making more than a graduate of your program?
All of these are personal and private information. If I apply to a startup tomorrow and get hired without listing my engineering degree on my resume, then are they supposed to add me to some national database of uneducated engineers, list my compensation, and explain that they would've hired a graduate for the same role too? If I apply to another company and list my degree then is that gonna overwrite the database? How the heck would this actually work?
But then again I suppose if you lead a cosseted life, never played with the contents of a shed, and had your first practical experience of actual hands on behaviour of viscous liquids in a lab… you might shout “Eureka”.
(Off the top of my head, a material that dissipates tension below a certain rate but fails when it is applied faster than that rate seems to resemble a mechanical breaker. As in not an electrical breaker that works mechanically. But one that decouples when you pull on it super hard. Being able to do that in fluids means one can potentially do that at very tiny scales.
More broadly, if simple fluids have a quasi-elastic mode, that has fundamental implications for hydrodynamics. I'd be super curious to know, for example, if anything similar to this occurs in air or water.)
Oh, btw: electricity was a novelty toy for several long decades with no major practical applications. But that eventually changed because people kept researching it. And it changed the world.