science

19785 readers

283 users here now

A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.

rule #1: be kind

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Physicists Discover a New State of Matter Hidden in The Quantum World (www.sciencealert.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

You're familiar with the states of matter we encounter daily – such as solid, liquid, and gas – but in more exotic and extreme conditions, new states can appear, and scientists from the US and China just found one.

They're calling it the chiral bose-liquid state, and as with every new arrangement of particles we discover, it can tell us more about the fabric and the mechanisms of the Universe around us – and in particular, at the super-small quantum scale.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

because a biochemical soup cannot independently select in favor of chirality.

it absolutely can, it just does so randomly. there are reactions that can amplify that random enantiomeric excess, and then, with exponential growth of one form, you need to be lucky only once

the first source of chirality could have been a particular piece of char https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAH_world_hypothesis

this material behaves chirally only in strong magnetic field. this is completely unrelated to abiogenesis