[HN Gopher] The Joy of Condensed Matter
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       The Joy of Condensed Matter
        
       Author : EvgeniyZh
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2021-03-25 08:23 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com)
        
       | aj7 wrote:
       | Warning about computation using light. The DeBroglie wavelength
       | of practical light is huge! Don't expect miniaturization.
        
       | centimeter wrote:
       | For those unfamiliar, John Baez is great. One of the few people
       | who seems to have a good, highly connected understanding across
       | most/all of modern physics. This is very rare even among
       | physicists. He's also credited in a lot of excellent ([hard]
       | science fiction) books by Greg Egan.
        
       | spxtr wrote:
       | Nice article!
       | 
       | Many of the cool excitonic properties that he describes were
       | recently (last 10 years ish) seen in a class of materials known
       | as TMDCs:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_metal_dichalcogenid...
       | 
       | Condensed matter physics is the largest field of physics by
       | number of PhDs granted, but I feel like it gets a
       | disproportionately low amount of pop sci coverage.
        
       | warbaker wrote:
       | This article attributes the transistor to Shockley, but this is
       | incorrect. It was really invented by John Bardeen and Walter
       | Brattain. Shockley, their manager, tried to steal all the credit,
       | and mostly succeeded.
       | https://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/addlbios/egos.html
        
         | cambalache wrote:
         | > This article attributes the transistor to Shockley, but this
         | is incorrect.
         | 
         | The article does not claim such thing. John writes
         | 
         | " After many further developments, in 1948 the physicist
         | William Schockley patented transistors that use both holes and
         | electrons to form a kind of switch. "
         | 
         | Which it is correct as you can easily check here:
         | https://patents.google.com/patent/US2569347
         | 
         | This not the case of PHB robbing all the limelight from the
         | engineers. Shockley was kinda of an asshole and had a big ego
         | but he was a great scientist. And the junction transistor he
         | individually designed and patented (see above) went on to be
         | more successful than the point-contact transistor developed by
         | Brattain and Bardeen. The Nobel prize was fairly awarded to the
         | three of them.
        
       | b215826 wrote:
       | While condensed matter is a very important and interesting
       | research field, people in condensed matter are gravitating
       | towards low-effort high-reward problems as grant committees don't
       | seem to care about the quality of the research being done. This
       | is especially true in my field of soft-condensed (i.e.,
       | classical) condensed matter, where questionable amounts of money
       | and time is being spent on problems inspired by biology and
       | engineering, where physicists have made very few legitimate
       | contributions. On the other hand, the number of physicists
       | working on fundamental problems in soft-condensed matter and
       | related areas (e.g., fluid turbulence, elasticity theory,
       | renormalization, etc.) is shockingly small.
        
       | ArtWomb wrote:
       | >>> We are living in the golden age of condensed matter physics
       | 
       | Nice read. Deserves a full catalog of all miraculous materials
       | advances since the semiconductor. We are rapidly approaching the
       | era in which phase diagrams are a "solved" problem, like
       | Backgammon or Atari ;)
       | 
       | Metastable-solid phase diagrams derived from polymorphic
       | solidification kinetics
       | 
       | https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2017809118
        
         | jcims wrote:
         | I feel like there will be some new and powerful materials and
         | chemical synthesis mechanisms that are derived from our growing
         | understanding of genetic transcription/translation. Could be an
         | interesting century in human history.
        
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