Might be doing real research soon. There;s a project on healing with electromagnetism. something about boosting the immune system. nobody here knows a cyclotron from their left nut except me. I’m the only one in-house with any physics knowledge. In a few months, I might spend a while 100% on this project. any instruments and training I need. = teh cool. 😀 .
-IggDawg
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Magnetars – magnetic neutron stars
Just read an article in this months Scientific American about Magnetars. (For some reason I want to say Magna-tards). They’re like neutron stars and stuff, except that at the moment of collapse right as the star is forming in the center of a supernova, the ultrasupercompressed nucliec material starts, like, convecting. It starts convecting hardcore, like making complete loops from the center to the surface and back 200 times per second. As this happens, the neutron star also starts rotating faster and faster as it contracts.
If the speed of rotation and speed of convection are matched up right, the thing sets up a wicked magnetic field. How wicked? 10^15 gauss wicked. That’s almost two orders of magnitude beyond the magnetic quantum electrodynamic limit. The physics out there is beyond weird. Atoms become elongated in in the field until they are 100 times longer than they are wide. The vacuum of space itself become birefringent to light, like a calcite crystal. X-ray photons split in two and recombine freely.
They’re guessing that at the center of magna-tards, err– magnetars, the pressure is so dense that not even close-packed neutrons can hack it. The current model predicts a crust/mantle/core structure sort of like Earth. Crust is a lattice of ultradense needle-shaped elongated metal nuclei that may form some kind of superconducting polymer. The mantle is regular old neutrons, packed so dense that electrons are few and far between. At the very core not even neutrons break down into individual QUARKS that are packed in as close as can be. It blows my mind, man.
I think I need to find a bunch of hippies and get them stoned, and then let them read the magnetar article, and then videotape them as their minds explode.
Umm, so yeah. Magnets = teh cool.
Congratulations, Igg 🙂