We Know Simple Fluids Can Flow. Turns Out, Some Can Fracture
62 points
3 hours ago
| 4 comments
| quantamagazine.org
| HN
jzer0cool
8 minutes ago
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This seems more of inertia, Newton's first law. "An object at rest stays at rest,...". What comes to mind say there is some threshold acceleration (e.g. or at extreme, accelerate to c within some short time, t), then essentially you have a body at rest and breaks at the weakest point. Interesting would be seeing this effect with varying viscosity.
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nelox
31 minutes ago
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Turns out glass has been known to be a fluid and to fracture for quite some time.

[edit: but glass is not a simple fluid.]

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helltone
22 minutes ago
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I thought glass was a solid?
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Eji1700
4 minutes ago
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It's an amorphous solid last time I dove into this.

The "well it's technically a liquid!" because it "flows" is really not telling the whole story. Like most science, it's just more complex than can be quickly summarized with one sentence, and doesn't quite map to just high school simplifications.

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vlovich123
20 minutes ago
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Nope, lots of fluids that just flow over such a long period they appear solid.
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vlovich123
1 minute ago
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Not sure why klustregrif got flagged - the answer was informative and correct.

What I said is true but not for glass. Pitch is a liquid even though it feels like a solid and shatters when smashed.

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bonesss
4 minutes ago
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That ‘long period’ can be many billions of years, glass is an amorphous solid.
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dd8601fn
1 hour ago
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This looks like silly putty behavior.
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jdlshore
57 minutes ago
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Oobleck (corn starch and water) will do this too. But presumably they already knew that. The article describes it as being known to happen in “complex fluids,” but that it was news that it happens in “simple fluids.” Presumably silly putty and oobleck are “complex fluids?”
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nycdweller349
1 hour ago
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Someone tell me the industries that are going to benefit the most from this in the short and long term and what I can expect to see in the next 30 years as a result of this discovery.
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JumpCrisscross
26 minutes ago
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It’s a new, generalizable material-science property at STP. Those almost always find practical uses.

(Off the top of my head, a material that dissipates tension below a certain rate but fails when it is applied faster than that rate seems to resemble a mechanical breaker. As in not an electrical breaker that works mechanically. But one that decouples when you pull on it super hard. Being able to do that in fluids means one can potentially do that at very tiny scales.

More broadly, if simple fluids have a quasi-elastic mode, that has fundamental implications for hydrodynamics. I'd be super curious to know, for example, if anything similar to this occurs in air or water.)

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helpfulclippy
1 hour ago
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That sounds like a lot of work for someone to go do for a quanta article about something neat a researcher noticed.
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calrt
1 hour ago
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I worry that this sort of request will become the norm in the age of AI where people forget that people aren’t there to serve them.
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gmueckl
1 hour ago
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Maybe it will not have any mmediate application. But guess what? It's still cool! And that can be its very own reward if you let it.

Oh, btw: electricity was a novelty toy for several long decades with no major practical applications. But that eventually changed because people kept researching it. And it changed the world.

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lostlogin
1 hour ago
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You made an account to say that?
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lstodd
1 hour ago
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he had his llm to make an account to post this.
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