Question to scientists? Crazy experiment i was told about, possible or non-sense???
Offline I worked with a guy for a year who one day told me about his brother who was a genius scientist who wroked for various governments and agencies working on new technologies . He said he worked on anti-gravity propulsion for 8 years or something. He was a decent guy, head on straight smart no reason to think he would lie. One day he described an experiment his brother conducted one day (i believe he said it was recorded/televised,) thats pretty crazy to me. Forgive my ignorance with terminology as i try to explain what he did which is way above my head, im no scientist. So he took a brick size piece of solid metal (no idea what kind) and hooked it up to his "machine" (whatever that was). This machine somehow de-densified the molecules in the metal. He then manually inserted a standard canadian loonie into the brick. He then re-densified the metal and it solidified around the loonie. He then cut the brick open on a precise metal saw to reveal the loonie intact, completely surrounded by solid metal all around it. Is this possible? Or wast this guy just broother crazy and just made it all up.
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Doesn't sound plausible to me.
"This guy told me that his brother said that..."
is already quite enough indirection to allow for a made-up story.
Need a little more corroboration I think before taking it seriously.
Whereas the possibility of anti-gravity has been studied as one of the 'blue-sky' future technologies at NASA, AFAIK.
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It sounds like he invented a knew illusion for Penn & Teller or some other stage magician. Like most illusions it might be entertaining.
De-densified sounds like a woo-woo way of saying "heat expansion" all metals will expand under heat in short the molecules become less dense. In order for any metal or alloy to become "soft" enough to insert a brass loonie it would have to be close to liquid form, Thats a lot of heat no matter what the metal or alloy compound is; Far too hot for a human hand to be near and the loonie would liquify even faster.
A butt welder could heat the brick of metal, it super heats the ends of metal sheets and actually melds them together to make one big sheet; by induction heating. The welder/melder is the size of an SUV, the transformer needed to supply the electricity would be at least the size of a bus. The cutter needed to splice a brick of metal would be the size of a pool table. Imagine the size of his light bill.
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Well Jeffrick, I did some product testing a while back on a low melting temperature solder that could possibly overcome your objection. Of course I cannot say that this is what we are talking about but even so...
Basically, the product was a thin foil that melted at about 65c. You put a bit of it between your CPU and heat sink and fire up the computer. Before it softens, it is a poor conductor due to surface irregularities. As a result, your CPU will fairly quickly build up enough heat to soften the metal.
Once it begins to soften, it flows into the gaps (helped by the fact that a typical heat sink is held in place by 5 to 10 kg of spring force). After that point, you have a full metal to metal contact and the CPU will cool down a bit from the improved thermal conductivity.
I highly doubt that you would want to submerge your hand in a bowl of molten metal even at that fairly low temperature. However, I could see being able to push a coin through the stuff barehanded. Related to that, google tells me that the loony is 91.5% Ni, so they are not great thermal conductors.
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Bob is right to point out that the further removed one is from the original story, the greater the possibility that something is amiss. Except that I will go one step further.
You remember the kids game where one person whispers something to the person next to them and the same happens around the room. But the time the original has been through a few retellings, what comes out the end is quite different from the original.
Perhaps there is a grain of truth but since it has already been retold at couple of times (and I am coming to it as: So some guy on an internet forum said that...) the story is already changed from the original enough to lose any plausibility that the real story may have had. I can only guess here but possibly the person at the beginning of the story was researching something and it has already become a pretty much impossible story.
One candidate could be that the real original research was into a material called aerogel.
Aerogel is a very low density solid material (sort of like the green foam that florists use) that can support bricks, mainly because the pressure is spread out over the surface. However, it will collapse locally if the spot pressure goes past a critical threshold. So you might be able to shove a coin into an otherwise solid block of the stuff. Then it can be cut with a saw to show the coin intact.
That is, of course, only a guess. Materials researchers work with all manner of stuff that has properties which are not quite like what one handles in every day life. So there may well be other things that could have been at the heart of this.
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Looking at my post again, I really should have added "or mis-interpreted or misunderstood" to "made-up".
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Oh, I have seen people read actual published papers and completely misinterpret what was presented.
Back when I was more active in the overclocking scene, I remember someone finding a paper on thermal conductivity of different materials and coming to the conclusion that the “best material” tested would be worthwhile as a CPU to heatsink transfer medium. Too bad that the paper was not even about that.
Actually, it is a very well known (in the overclocking community at least) that when you install a heat sink, your processor temperature will start low and then climb over the first few days as the liquid carrier for the thermal material cooks out of the join.
A careful reading of the paper would show that what was being tested was the cooling in the first fraction of a second after the material was applied. Also, all of the materials that were being tested were powdered insulators which were carried in the liquid. What was actually being tested was the effect of the liquid carrier leaving the join and not the other materials.
Yet several people in the community actually tried to prepare a home brewed mixture of carbon black and polyethylene glycol, thinking that somehow the carbon black (which is used to insulate industrial furnaces) was the material being tested.
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I pre-warned you about my ignorance in scientific terminology.
This was all i was told. I knew him about 2 years and he had endless stories of his brother that never contradicted eachother. To me it sounded impossible but for all i know it was a commenly known experiment, thats why i asked, i figured the responses would point to bs.
This reminds me of the Nathan Landau character in Sophie's Choice