The Joy of Condensed Matter

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2021/03/24/the-joy-of-condensed-matter/

by EvgeniyZh • 5 years ago

107 24 5 years ago

johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com

ArtWomb• 5 years ago

>> 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• 5 years ago

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.

spxtr• 5 years ago

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.

warbaker2• 5 years ago

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

cambalache2• 5 years ago

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 a 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.

warbaker2• 5 years ago

John Bardeen is one of the greatest physicists of all time. He is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in physics.

Shockley may have been a talented scientist, but he did not invent the transistor, and tried to steal (not share in, but steal) the credit from the people who did.

Newton was a jerk, but he invented modern physics. Shockley was also a jerk, but that doesn't mean he invented the transistor.

aspaceman• 5 years ago

kinda an asshole

“ My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment.”

Shockley was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 1982 United States Senate election in California. He ran on a single-issue platform of highlighting the "dysgenic threat"

Shockley's name was not on any of these patent applications. This angered Shockley, who thought his name should also be on the patents because the work was based on his field effect idea. He even made efforts to have the patent written only in his name, and told Bardeen and Brattain of his intentions.

Some context for the kinda. I’m not impressed much by a guy who can crank out papers and be important in post-WW2 U.S. I have no idea what qualifies as great scientist here. Seems more like you have some “scientist’s legacy ruined by him being a bit of a jerk” angle.

mjfl• 5 years ago

Eh, I don’t think this is true. People want to discredit Shockley because he was a big racist, but he was a legitimate scientist. PBS does this kind of smear to a lot of people who were morally questionable, like Henry Ford.

adrian_b• 5 years ago

Bardeen and Brattain have discovered experimentally the point-contact transistor, without really understanding how it functions.

Shockley has really invented the bipolar junction transistor and the junction field-effect transistor, which are far more important electronic devices and which are still used today, unlike the point-contact transistor.

Shockley has published theories of how his transistors function, which enabled the design of such devices.

No matter what defects had Shockley as a human being, his legacy is much more important than that of Bardeen and Brattain.

Even the fact that he was an awful manager had very positive results for everybody else, because he initially gathered together the best of the best in his company, who, after fleeing from him, founded then the most important semiconductor manufacturing companies in SV.

Also, the first inventor of transistors was Lilienfeld, who invented a kind of metal-semiconductor FET in 1925 and a kind of depletion-mode metal-insulator-semiconductor FET in 1928.

The Lilienfeld patents had very little influence at that time because the technology to make such transistors did not exist yet, but nevertheless his patents were a source of inspiration for the Bell team, who actually attempted to make FET transistors similar to those proposed by Lilienfeld, when they discovered by accident the point-contact transistor.

The point-contact transistor was not a really useful device, but its great historical importance is that it triggered a lot of research in semiconductor devices and that the efforts made by Shockley to understand how the point-transistor can function lead him to the invention of the BJT and then of the JFET.

The initial theories of transistors published by Shockley were extremely approximate, but they were usable in practice and their study enabled the appearance of an entire generation of electronics engineers specialized in semiconductor devices.

The contributions of Bardeen and Brattain are not negligible, but they remain quite small compared to the huge contribution of Shockley.

Someone could be a mass murderer, but nonetheless he/she could also publish some theory worth of a Nobel prize. Such qualities are unrelated and any theory or discovery must be judged only on its own merits, not on whether the inventor is a nice human or not.

aj73• 5 years ago

Warning about computation using light. The DeBroglie wavelength of practical light is huge! Don’t expect miniaturization.

nextaccountic• 5 years ago

What does this mean?

pwr22• 5 years ago

I think it means that quantum effects become a problem when you get to around that size.

rini17• 5 years ago

Light has a wavelength hundreds of nanometers. That means it's hard, if not impossible, to do useful stuff with it with higher density than that. And there is light with shorter wavelengths, like extreme ultraviolet, but it has other disadvantages.

perlgeek• 5 years ago

There are still some use cases where light-based computation could work very well without miniaturization, just don't expect it to replace general-purpose chips.

One possible application is in the amplification stages of optical communication links. If you could do error correction in pure optical circuits, you could avoid the optical -> electrical -> optical conversion, and save lots of energy -- something quite relevant for submarine cables, for example.

aj73• 5 years ago

Good point.

b2158262• 5 years ago

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.

zeofig• 5 years ago

Yeah, I've witnessed this myself. The amount of money that goes into materials projects with "medical imaging" or similar supposed applications is crazy. Most of these "novel" materials are created by some process the authors don't fully understand. They usually have some electrical or optical properties that are unusual, but given the range of possible materials almost anything can turn out to be unusual in some way. Anyway, you combine such materials with a few big names, and you keep the grant snowball rolling rolling rolling, and you publish in Nature XYZ on a monthly basis. Meanwhile I see professors doing good and serious fundamental work in condensed matter (and many other areas) losing their jobs.

b2158262• 5 years ago

In this spirit, I really like this disclaimer from the conclusion of a preprint on the arXiv [1]:

This paper is not intended for journal publication. Therefore, it lacks the delusional claims typically found in published papers about its (simultaneous) relevance to drug design, nanoelectronics, photonics, spintronics or any other fashionable application. Also, everyone can sleep at peace without worrying about missed citations and their h-index (and without e-mailing me to complain about them).

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1232v3

centimeter• 5 years ago

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.

cambalache2• 5 years ago

John is fantastic, not only a nice person with absolutely zero ego, he has brain and heart and he has such a deep love for science, a funny writer too. Anything that he writes (TWIMP,his diary,his blog Azimuth, n-category cafe, his book ) is highly recommended.

This is a must read for the aspiring mathematician or physicist:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html

Bonus points for being the nephew of Joan Baez.

moralestapia• 5 years ago

An opinion for an opinion,

From my (first-hand) experience with him, he is quite egotistical and I definitely wouldn't describe his manner as "hearthly".

That does not change anything regarding his accomplishments and insights, though.

graderjs• 5 years ago

Strange aside: I always thought there should be a physics themed speakeasy-style cocktail bar. Not only for the liquid He/N2 smoke effects but also for the cool names and 'properties' of drinks:

- Non-Newtonian Attractor

- Condensed Matter Martini

- Quantum Entangled Pair (of GTs)

- Fluorescentinine

- Selenium Xenon on the Beach

- Solid State Sour

- Heavy Water Old Fashioned

- Heisenberg's Hitter

If I had the capital and partners I'd start scoping digs and building that today. So fun! :)

The Joy of Condensed Matter

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