User:RD/9k/Are apples givanium? (Q618)

Main entry

618. Q618/Q618

     Are apples made of givanium?

     / Are apples givanium crystals? / Are apples a single chemical substance perhaps containing crystal structure but consisting of one chemical element containing infinite protons? ->
     

     rhetorical question you answer anarchists with. "wouldn't you prefer a civilization without political divisions or formal political organs to one with cops and soldiers?" "are apples made of givanium?" answer: "no; I wouldn't prefer something that doesn't make material sense and doesn't reflect the way material reality actually works, because if something is based on faulty premises and makes no sense I cannot want it; it is essentially a scam".

87. Q87/Q87

    Idealism

    (truth value) / Are apples made of givanium? (generic) / (9k) -> you know what is extra hilarious about this question? that in the original game the liquid givanium in the barrels is magic. it takes something inert and plausible and injects a nonsensical idea into it and makes it go. in some ways it's a perfect metaphor for how Idealism functions

Background

618. Givanium

     [1] -> fictional substance which is said to have an infinite atomic number. it also does bogus frankenstein stuff but I'm filing that under "arbitrary tacked-on lore" almost exactly like the lore assigned to radioactive elements in Spiderman.

618. element with infinite protons

     / givanium (generic) -> I'm obsessed with the concept of an element with infinite protons. what would that mean?
     

     it would mean just a sea of protons and neutrons held together by quantum interactions and not divided into separate atoms, wouldn't it? but all put together about as close as they would be in an atom. so realistically it wouldn't be something you would put in a syringe, that would probably be a star functioning like one big atom. which somehow has protons as well as neutrons. a neutron star is full of neutrons but it isn't a normal nucleus, all the electrons get crushed.
     I think there's no getting around the fact this would qualify as exotic matter, because this is absolutely not a normal way atoms form most of the time.
     so.... if it's being referred to as an element, I think that means it has protons, and that it has infinite protons, because that's what the atomic number usually counts. there are infinite protons extending out however far but they are all held together with quantum forces, and it maybe has electrons. if this element could exist at room temperature (can exotic matter ever do that? seems doubtful) I'd have a lot of questions about its reactivity. like, it's going to be kind of like a liquid crystal made of protons. [2] if we're sticking closely to the original rules, then any particular gap in the protons keeps closing each time it forms so the liquid crystal stays one crystal. are the electrons all on the outside of the crystal? wouldn't that be hugely reactive or something? unless the electrons were perfectly balanced and it was perfectly inert like a noble gas, but it's obviously way too heavy to be a gas. very funny idea though, you have the biggest atom ever and it does precisely nothing. I think this nonsensical substance is similar to either a solid or liquid, just because it's so big, I mean, it's so much matter to put together it's basically like a boulder, right? especially if you put so many protons into one crystal you had an almost person-sized crystal like in the game. we're assuming that while they don't "come alive", it's still possible to have a big hunk of this weird element with about as much mass as a human. a typical human contains around 63,500 grams of mass. which is actually 20,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (pronounced 20.3 octillion) protons. so, not infinite protons in every hunk of them, but, a solid 20 octillion isn't bad. how would you measure a mole of this though. would it be by the number of protons? by the assumed number of quarks?? it'd have to be something weird like that, that a mole of this atom equals an avogadro of the mass of six quarks, and if and when it reacts, it takes multiple moles per one mole of another substance, but that's just considered normal with "elements" this absurdly big. [3]

618. element with infinite protons / givanium (generic) -> realistically even if this thing was stable there would be radioactive decay periodically, every time protons fall off in a little accident something is getting irradiated or catching on fire. so I bet you'd have to keep it in water. I doubt it would even be a good nuclear fuel because we said it was more stable than uranium due to the back-and-forth quantum forces throughout the material; it'd be a little like americium maybe, stable but just a little too dangerous to handle trivially. whenever atoms come apart it's never pretty, it's always more dangerous than when things like puddles of water come apart.
     and I think it's because atoms are closer to the genuine boundary between one physical object and another, the actual boundary between integrity and physicality versus gaseous state or vacuum. no object bigger than an atom generally has an edge defined by jumps smaller than atoms. there are chemical bonds that are varying strengths but that's the only real time the boundary between solids or liquids is fuzzier than that. without exception the boundary between two rocks or two planks is almost always at the edge of an atom, and no matter how far a hydrogen bond stretches before it breaks the edges of atoms factor into divisions at the edge of a pool of water too. the edges of an atom are serious business, I feel like. the forces or interactions inside the atom are relatively strong, but the forces between atoms are not as strong, which makes the act of pulling apart an atom much harder. if it's an ordinary atom. if it's a crazy several-pounds atom then the other interactions across the atom coming from thousands of protons might be pulling it apart. a force powerful enough to pull apart the strongest bonds there are is a terrifying thing to mess with.
618. element with infinite protons / givanium (generic) -> what is..... the gravity output of this thing? have scientists ever tried to observe whether there is a noticeable difference between a light element like helium and a heavy element like americium in how atoms lead to gravity? usually when it comes to gravity you hear about whole hunks of mass producing gravity, not tiny portions of matter like a few atoms. but... there has to be some difference between a mole of helium and a mole of lead, and one big soup of protons and neutrons packed together tighter than a mole of lead. we may not know exactly how gravity happens but we know that more points of mass mean more gravity interactions. part of why a neutron star is so "scary" is that every atom in the star acts like an origin of gravity and they all act on each other, solidifying great amounts of gravity in the star that keep going at every moment — although that does happen because there is a star's worth of mass put together, not a baseball's worth of nucleons or a person's worth of nucleons. could there be enough mass in this atom that gravity would start acting to hold it together? I doubt it but I wonder how many protons and neutrons are required before gravity adds to the strong force. [4]

Macroscopic hydrogen atom

618. Q618/Q618 What would macroscopic photons look like? / What would a photon look like if it was the size of a tennis ball? -> this question haunts me sometimes. it's a silly question, but it's fun because it makes us ask what we actually know and don't know about physics. assumptions: only one photon is huge at a time. you can hurl photons at the photon. the other photons might go through it — Bose physics. it probably isn't static, you're looking at some weird phenomenon of a giant photon coming out of your flashlight and going to the wall. it has the energy of a regular photon, so it won't burn you if it didn't come out of the sun. it might be a wave; whatever it being a wave actually means you would observe. it might be a sloshy mess that isn't exactly one neat ball and more resembles two. it might be doing strange things to locality, making it terribly weird to look at. it is quantized; being huge doesn't change the nature of it being an approximately single packet with a particular energy inside. it might be some kind of weird spiral in order to carry magnetism. you're allowed to change the premise so there are exactly one of a few different fundamental particles at a time or some small number if it makes it easier to represent field coupling.
618. Q618/Q618 What would macroscopic protons look like? / What would a proton look like if the quarks were the size of tennis balls? -> this one haunts me even more. because the funny thing is, quarks are solid. protons are solid. being fermions, they have the minimum kind of solidity to form tangible objects. so a proton might actually look like something? or you might see it as a blur of the three quarks going around much too fast. I wonder, could you burn things up by trying to poke the proton with a stick? would the acceleration be that bad? or would it just fly backward like a normal air molecule? we're assuming it has the mass of a proton, so when it's impossibly big it would probably be able to float in some substances, maybe even in air because that is a ridiculous density. it's also true that a proton can be a normal atom — a hydrogen ion. so you might think of it as just a huge gas molecule. could you pick it up with a magnet due to it being charged? I don't know.
     imagine taking an oversized neutron and just, putting together atoms. the concept of an oversized chemical reaction is mildly scary, knowing some of them are dangerous. but then again you could just assemble water and that would probably be fine. what would the hydrogen bonds actually look like
5040. Q5040/Q50,40 allegory of the cave [5] -> in some ways, the only real-life situation where this semi-literally occurs is quantum physics. quarks and atoms are the one time where we genuinely only see shadows projected on the mouth of a cave and yet we can't go into the cave because the shadows have moved away before we get in. but somehow, periodically you see regular things come out of the cave that are just like anything else outside, but aren't the same as the shadows. the transition from quantum to classical is so weird and frustrating. arguably, the transition from atoms to substances is also a little weird and frustrating, because if you listened to the video I linked here, it would begin to sound like the quantum scale hasn't really ended until you get outside molecules while inside a molecule or even exactly along the edge of an atom things are still quantum. or at least as "exactly" and "precisely" along the edge of an atom as a wave function can show — I think that has something to do with it.
618. Q618/Q618 What would a macroscopic gold atom look like? -> transition metals are very interesting in that relativistic effects change the wavelengths of light they absorb. so, like.... that raises the very strange question of if you had a gold atom the size of a tennis ball whether it would appear gold compared with an iron atom the size of a tennis ball
     it looks like.... for small clusters of atoms the electron absorption peak changes with the size and shape of the cluster. [6] [7] so, that maybe actually sort of explains why gold sometimes appears bright yellow and sometimes polished reflective gold appears almost brown or black. if I'm reading this paper right? it sounds to me like gold nanoparticles are almost a bit rainbow, sometimes peaking way in the red area and sometimes peaking in blue or ultraviolet. the variation in colors seems to be much greater when the particles are small and the shape of them can vary more greatly in proportion to their "typical" shape. so. wow. I may have learned something about the appearance of transition metals. any especially shiny metal probably trends toward a prismatic color the smaller it gets (I'm guessing this includes gold, silver, copper, aluminum, maybe zinc a bit...), inasmuch as you could see it at all or the concept of color would make sense. and the physical appearance of small particles including their color may largely be based on their three-dimensional shape. [8] but as pieces of metal get bigger and more uniform you mostly see one color with reflections on it, still sometimes distinct per chemical element.
     so yeah if you mysteriously had a huge gold atom it would probably be rather pretty to look at I imagine, depending on how much it deviates from a perfect sphere and how much the shape of it changes.
     I don't think the notion that "atoms are mostly empty space" would actually matter here. electrons seem to interact with light a lot, so really, in this scenario you're looking at the electron orbitals like they're an "object", as hard as that is to imagine. you have to think about the fact that every time you turn on a light, light is bouncing off the objects in the room, so light can bounce off electron orbitals, regardless of how solid they really are. we simply know that happens. whether light can touch something and whether the thing is there are different things, as shown by false-color radio images that catch unseen details, but they aren't unrelated things, so I say, if visible light shows up on something, then render that.

Metals

618. infinite hotel of hydrogen atoms [9] -> a hypothesis that if an electron moves off hydrogen at just the right moment while it is forming hydrogen gas, hydrogen can instead form an infinite thread of hydrogen atoms that electrons simply keep flowing through. calculations showed that this is one version of metallic hydrogen, the other major form being where all the hydrogen atoms are packed so close together in all directions that only the electrons can move.
     kind of like the infinite hotel math problem where you keep moving people right and there's always space. we managed to find a physical situation where that really happens, because the borders of the hydrogen molecule were actually not finite, because the molecule was moving around in open space and another hydrogen was added and it was able to get bigger.
     this is breaking my brain a little bit with regard to metallic rules. I searched this up on a tangent in the middle of trying to disprove anarchists and now I'm like, wait, but isn't there a mathematical way of expressing anarchism using infinite chains? that doesn't prove it can save the world but it does prove there's a logical reasoning inside it.
618. Plasma is bizarrely metal / Creating plasma from gas particles is similar but not identical to the process where electrons become free to flow around a sample of metal atoms [10] [11] -> I am not sure how true this is but the idea was really striking to me so I will have to look into the differences.
     it's these kinds of statements that really show how small scale models of chemistry and small scale models of society are conceptually similar kinds of analysis.
618. Relativity makes the periodic table interesting / The periodic table would be much more regular without relativistic effects, but relativistic effects alter the kinds of patterns that have appeared in sections of the table without them / All metals would be gray and solid, except that relativistic effects change the absorption frequencies of metals like gold and silver, and the melting point of mercury

Redox reactions

618. Fire is a process / Fire is not an object, but a process [12]
618. fire triangle
618. chemical reaction triangle -> a fire triangle can be generalized to any combustion reaction. on one point is energy. on one point is a reduced substance. on one point is an oxidized substance. one of the simplest examples is heat, oxygen, and a carbon compound.

Related

618. an anticommunist just lectured me about dialectical materialism [13] -> this is weirdly really common in the fields of chemistry and quantum physics and almost nowhere else. few people would think of it as a likely path, but no matter how isolated you are from other people, endlessly listening to introductory quantum physics lectures is one way to accidentally become a Communist. you become really unable to ignore that every particle in the room is the product of at least two things interacting back and forth with no first origin of things, and every atom is made of many things running into each other at once to produce time, rather than time itself driving anything.
     it seems some scientists and students are still trying to deny this with framings such as "differential equations", trying to imply that an overhead graph of stuff actually produces things varying against each other rather than the actual moving parts depicted in the graph. [[14]] I think within the next 50 years mathematics is genuinely going to have a paradigm shift where we realize that's wrong and most scientists weren't properly applying relativity to everything, and every physics model without relativity in it needs to be rewritten in terms of relativity.
618. element stability chart [15] [16] -> something clicked for me when I looked at this chart again. the stability output of every element comes from a lot of interactions inside the atom, the protons and neutrons and electrons, and the levels of the different forces against each other.
     I need.... to think about this as I continue to formalize color swatch analysis and the concept of assigning swatches, swatch-categories, and 2-3 letter "symbols" to different sociophilosophies. can they be expressed in terms of a common palette of radial forces instead of just social structures?
     this might explain some of the missing theory in how Deng Xiaoping Thought does or doesn't function. workers' states. radioactive atoms. weak force. strong force. electromagnetism. mass. think.

Ideology codes

• (none)