Grrl Power #416 – Meta analysis
It bothers me in science fiction when someone analyzes an object and says “It contains no known elements.” It sounds exotic, but that’s just not how chemistry works. The periodic table is pretty much set. There are probably a few elements left to discover at the extremes, but all the ones we’ve recently found in particle colliders with atomic masses nearing the 300’s are hilariously radioactive and only exist for nanoseconds. No one is making a spear tip or a phaser or body armor out of them. I’m not saying we’re done with chemistry, just that the elements are pretty nearly sorted at this point.
You could learn a lot about something by studying the egg it came out of, but if you’d never seen a bird before, could you tell what color feathers it had, or even what a feather was? Maybe if there was some sort of DNA left in the egg, but it’d be a lot of work.
Edit: Here’s a shot of Deus’s desk without all the word clutter.
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Diamonds, that is what was in the briefcase. Tarantino confirmed it but said it wasn’t shown because the same suitecase of diamonds were in previous movies of his as all his movies are in one realm, and letting it be shown it was the diamonds again would have been lack luster
Wow, QT killed the mystery? That sucks. Why did the briefcase give off a golden light, then?
It wasn’t diamonds in the briefcase. Not that diamonds wasn’t the answer given out at first in interviews. QT admitted after many years that the briefcase was suppose to have contained Marsellus Wallace’s soul. Diamonds doesn’t even make sense if you watch the movie closely (and put it in the right order). The clues are the light it gives off, everyone who sees it almost recognizes it, the combination to the briefcase is 666 and MANY others woven into the movie including the rape scene, the miracle and the reference to the show Kung Fu.
I think is was in 2005 QT finally let it drop during an interview about the Kill Bill movies.
Though it was originally supposed to be diamonds, it was later changed to be nothing in particular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_Fiction#The_mysterious_666_briefcase
Thank you. I don’t know why so many people feel the need to make a great mystery or metaphysics out of maybe the most basic example of abstract symbolism in popular culture. What’s in the briefcase is “something precious”; nothing more complicated than that. We’re not shown what it is because there’s no image that conveys the abstract idea of “something precious” as well as the light it casts on the observer’s face.
How and why does the light communicate the idea of something precious?
Well. . .most things don’t produce a golden light which makes everyone who sees it stand rapt in awe and struggle to form words. There’s probably other differences in how people in the movie react to what’s in the briefcase and how they react to other things that you could see for yourself.
yeah, it’s the MacGuffin, it doesn’t need to be actually identified.
In theory there could possibly be elements that wouldn’t even fit on the periodic table because of weird electron configurations that wouldn’t be possible with what we know about physics and chemistry. I wouldn’t label them as an existing element even if they had the same amount of protons as a known element.
There is just that tiny little detail that the periodic table is not based on electrons, but the number of protons, so even if they had vastly different electron configurations they would still just be some kind of ion belonging to that element in the pariodic table. Considering that the way to detect elements in a material is to ionize them and send them through a mass-spectrumeter, then they would behave the same after we have removed the electrons.
That would just make it an isotope of the given element.
Not even an isotope of an existing element, just one with the electrons in an excited rather than ground state.
I think you’re referring to the pseudo-elements whose nucleons might consist of exotic’ particles such as antileptons, mesons/antimesons, baryons/antibaryons (other than protons & neutrons), pentaquarks, or leptoquarks, and whose shells might contain muons, tauons or mesons/antimesons instead of just electrons.
But you seem to be a bit confused as to how elements are classified.
quick elements overview:
Elements are numbered by Protons. By default, they have the same number of electrons. If you add or remove electrons, it’s an Ion. Chemically, an Ion acts more like the element with a number of protons matching it’s current electron count, but not exactly. Thus the ions of sodium and chloride that make up salt are not only safe, but necessary for life, while the ‘normal’ elements are an explosive metal and a poisonous gas.
Atoms also often come with neutrons (all but the very smallest atoms). There is a most-common number of neutrons per element (which is way more complicated than the 1-for-1 of electrons, treat it as semi-random for now even though it’s not). Variants in the number of neutrons are called isotopes. Isotopes are almost perfectly identical for chemistry, but will have different physical (density) and radioactive decay properties (more or less likely to have a nucleus fission event, thus increasing or decreasing the half-life).
Any “Atom” not consisting of these particles (or anti-particle, for anti-matter) is not an element, and not really an atom, even if it has some behaviors like one. also, as far as I know, any exotic pseudo-atom that has been witnessed has been extremely unstable.
But protons are made of two up quarks and one down quark, and neutrons are made of one up quark and two down quarks. Suppose there were rare nucleons having a different number of quarks? Or possibly a third type of nucleon?
There is also the possibility that the “unknown elements” were actually superatom clusters; for examples, see https://www.pnnl.gov/science/highlights/highlight.asp?id=803
And again, there are still islands of stability we have not reached with our high energy fusion processes, and possibly supersymmetry may render one or more regions of these superheavy elements as stable on a more reasonable timescale.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Adam B, than are assumed in your far too elementary review of particle physics.
Particle physics is well understood enough though to make that pretty unlikely. You can’t hold a nucleus together without the strong force, so anything not made of quarks is out, and I’m pretty sure mesons don’t experience the residual strong force, so we need baryons (or even larger hadrons, but we’ll get back to that in a bit). Strange, charm, top, and bottom quarks are heavy and quickly decay into ups and downs, so they’re unlikely to show up in any stable nucleus. I don’t know why uuu and ddd don’t show up in nature, but I’m sure a particle physicist could explain great detail why a nucleus made of those would be completely physically impossible. And on the subject of islands of stability, that’s a relative term; it’s not impossible that we’ll find some large element with a half-life of seconds or more, but it’s not very likely. To the best of my limited knowledge, hadrons with more than three quarks look like the best candidate for stable alien elements, just because we know so little about them, but that’s a very long shot too.
I would say that novel stable elements would most likely be evidence of technology sufficient to keep unstable nuclei from decaying, and that would be very advanced technology.
They are studying coral and trying to figure out the DNA based on a cutting of the coral structure, the microbe fossils are the obviously important parts.
Better yet, if they did an isotropic distribution analysis of the materials in the geode, they would stand a pretty good chance of determining where in space it came from. Isotropic distribution is kind like a finger print of what nebular cloud the materials the item is composed of came from.
Different parts of space and different solar systems would have differing isotopes of both type and levels than others.
Problem is, I’m not really sure our current technology is advanced enough in stellar spectrography, to be able to differentiate the atomic distribution on an isotropic level yet. I somehow doubt it…
Gotta love the front of Deus’ desk! Very clever!
I was more interested in the standing bondage rack behind the desk…
Is there a chance we can get a better look at thathe desk? I see some things going on that need closer inspection.
For science?
Interesting and disturbing thought here;
If the stuff that came out of the geode was of an alien origin, and it gradually replaced Max’s cell structure with its’ own, is Max even human anymore, or is she some kind of alien Van Neumann device that only THINK’S it’s human?
If Max is now composed of some sort of alien nanomachine structure, a good case could be made that Max isn’t a person, but more of some sort of semi autonomous machine, like an Android. This could explain her abilities very easily, but may also make her susceptible to alien subroutines that may not have become active yet. Or they may have already been activated, and she’s transmitting data on the enhanced beings that came about through their nanotech genetic enhancements that they inflicted upon Earth many generations ago.
Max just happens to be a very well defended alien probe in the form of a super powered woman.
Addendum to my previous post; Sydney could also be the recipient of a similar alien artifact, (the orbs) meant to monitor the super powered people, but from a different set of aliens. They waited to synchronise with a person whose particular mindset, (or peculiar mindset, in Syd’s case) that best suited the nature of their mission. Kind of odd that the power’s that Sydney has are pretty much reflections, after a fashion, of those Max has.
Why would both, likely extremely long lived aliens, be doing this? Most likely, they probably have a running bet as to whether or not the human race will destroy itself from having supers amongst them, or… It’s one hell of a long term practical joke on the Human race!
Biologically I doubt she could be classified as human. Her genes are probably further from human standard than the chimpanzees are. But the question is what goes on in her head. She’s got a human family, human (and non human) friends, and she identifies as human most of the time. She grew up as a human and has experienced a normal childhood up until she dunked herself in whatever it was in tha capsule. Even then she lived with her parents and got teased by her little brother, went to a normal school and tried to fit in like any normal kid. She enlisted and has done at least one tour in the middle east. She’s made friends, and probably lost some to the horrors of war.
I’d say she’s earned the right to be called human no matter what her genes look like today.
I’m not so much thinking she’s even a truly biological entity anymore. She could be a completely nanotech based “device” that THINKS she’s a human, but is instead a device running a “simulation” that evolves over time, but may have “subroutines” that she is not aware of.
At this point you’re getting into semantics, though, because animal life including humans are basically biological “machines” to begin with; there’s even people who argue that there’s no such thing as truly “free” will if you get to the heart of it, because on some level your neurology and hormones, which contain whatever barely-understood structures/mechanisms that support cognition, emotions, and consciousness and therefore arguably your “self”, are limited by their structures and composition, which are in turn controlled in part by your environment and in part by biochemical destiny in the form of the genome and epigenetic tags.
tldr humans arguably aren’t all that different from a very advanced, computerized robot except for being mushier and grosser in composition. There’s a reason the brain is called “wetware” by a lot of people, it’s basically biological hardware running biological software.
And at that point you can basically throw out “she’s running a program/mechanical” as any argument for why she can’t be a CULTURALLY considered “human” or at least “a person”. Genetically, no, biologically maybe, but in terms of experiencing high-level cognition and CLEARLY experiencing some sort of emotive reactions, she’s definitely sentient (capable of feelings) in addition to sapient (capable of intelligence), and thus, again, a person, no matter how you want to splice it.
Incorrect, living things possess elan vital, which makes them qualitatively different from animals; it is the means by which God imbues them with free will.
The question is not what is going on in her head, it is what is going on in her DNA.
Most biologists would say that Max is a totally different species than human, but it’s possible that she would still be capable of producing fertile offspring with a human male, in which case she would have to be considered human regardless of how much the biologists wouldn’t like it.
But regardless of whether or not she is human she is still a person. Your body is made of meat, you are made of information. As long as the memories, associations, and ways of thinking are the same it doesn’t really make a difference what you are made of. Depending how you look at things it still might not make a difference if you consider souls to exist.
Well said, Motarp!
And ah, biology. How I love thee…even as I want to hit my head against a wall with you, sometimes!
I recall a while back looking into the definition of “species” for the sake of one of my own works – where there is a “race” of people with select dramatic differences from humans (e.g. think along the lines of “fantasy elves, except not entirely magical” – long lived, capable of certain powers normal humans don’t have, slightly different developmental lifecycle, etc.), who were nonetheless supposed to be descended from a recent hominid in common with modern/Cro-Magnon humans and externally appear, sound, etc. identical to one. They can reproduce with humans – in fact, it’s a plot point that one of the characters is “mixed race” hybrid, half-“human”, half one of these people – and while I’ve scrapped the idea of doing it with that particular character for now it is actually the case that “half-breeds” like that can actually themselves reproduce, including fertile offspring (they don’t even have a weird chromosome count, so it’s not even a case of a non-fertile hybrid like a liger or mule)…with either “humans” or the other ones, in fact.
I was curious, to be honest, if that would cause them to be classified as merely a “sub-species” of human by our standards, or maybe even just an isolated population (which they were), or whether they’d still be a different species (which would beg the question of what the offspring of them and humans would be considered?)
What I discovered is that SOME biologists would classify them as a different species and SOME would classify it as a sub-species and others wouldn’t bother to differentiate and simply consider them a grouping of healthy mutant humans since they can mix with “humans” entirely and…basically if you think biologists consistently agree on just about anything complicated or nuanced, you’re apparently wrong. :P
However, I was left with very little doubt that they’d still be considered “people” by human standards, as their brains/minds work at least on the same level as humans’ and we’ve already got a handful of biologists and animal rights activists arguing that animal rights laws should be different for say, dolphins (highly intelligent, highly social) or African grey parrots (equivalent intelligence and sociability to a human toddler, albeit with a COMPLETELY alien brain structure. Seriously, google this stuff up, it’s fascinating) because of how “close” they already come to human intelligence/emotion.
tldr again, even if Maxima were no longer “biologically human” she’s definitely a person. Legally, that won’t have changed, and morally it shouldn’t, since she shows every clear sign of sentience and independent thought/emotion. I doubt we’ll find out anytime soon if she can reproduce with humans, let alone what the results would be, but it’d be…interesting to know, for sure.
Just keep in mind that even if she were infertile, though, it wouldn’t mean she wasn’t “human/alive” – there are plenty of conditions that can cause humans to become infertile, and it could even be irrelevant to the, er, other conditions that produced her powers.
If you have to tell people something is interesting and disturbing, it isn’t.
Is that a Phil Ken Sebben text alert?
No, it is either part of this or, personal believe, this
It’d be very dangerous to field test this, but Sydney might be able to counter that mind control by putting Max in her shield.
I doubt that would work, as, if she were under some form of alien mind control, it’s likely they’d either use some form of quantum entanglement or quantum tunneling to transmit and receive data from Max.
One thing about knowing the entire periodic table:
We thought we knew all the elements a few hundred years ago. Why are we more certain?
Also, the distinction between elements is based in protons, but if you could pack an absurd amount of electrons onto one element (doesn’t really matter which), physics as we know it breaks down, FAST.
Could there be new elements? Absolutely. That appear in large quantities for extended periods of time? Probably not. But this all assumes that our theories about science stand true FOREVER.
Dabbler’s rail gun alone means that we don’t know everything about the physics of this world, so there could be an entirely new particle (let’s call it the Newon) that gives Max her powers.
WOW I’ve over thought this!
At least your thoughts leave the possibility of ‘yet-to-be-discovered’ as a valid and viable option
If we look at this in-comic then I’d like to say that I find the rad eater Dabbler used far weirder than her rail gun. If the read eater is a machine then the the laws of physics as we know them can’t explain how it does what it does. And if it’s magic then we have to rewrite the laws of physics to allow for it.
Who am I kidding, in-comic the laws of physics are broken more often than not. I’d say this kind of sums it up:
Question is if the laws of physics and the laws of magic are firmly separated. My guess is that they aren’t and that physicists are going to have a tough few years ahead of them once they have to acknowledge that magic actually exists…
And again EGS has some suitable material for this.
I would doubt that any scientist believes we know the entire periodic table. What we know for certain is that we do not yet know all the elements. However, the ones we don’t know are sure to be highly radioactive and unstable because their nuclei are too large to be held together properly by the strong force.
If you could pack an absurd number of electrons onto an atom (which I don’t see how you could without adding enough energy to cause fission) it’s not physics that breaks down fast, it’s the atomic shell that breaks down. The atom will quickly shed most of those extra electrons to nearby atoms until it reaches stability.
“…There are probably a few elements left to discover at the extremes, but all the ones we’ve recently found in particle colliders with atomic masses nearing the 300’s are hilariously radioactive and only exist for nanoseconds. No one is making a spear tip or a phaser or body armor out of them. I’m not saying we’re done with chemistry, just that the elements are pretty nearly sorted at this point.”
Maybe. But then again, maybe not. As a generalization, I think humanity is rather arrogant to believe that we’ve pretty nearly sorted out how the universe works and that science has discovered most of the important stuff. Granted, we’ve come a long ways and it’s amazing what science can explain. But it wasn’t all that long ago that people were convinced that the world was flat or that it was impossible for man to fly. I suspect that, a few centuries from now, people would still shake their heads at how ignorant people of today are about certain things.
I vaguely recall reading something sci-fi a number of years ago which had an explanation for finding new, exotic elements that are usable and quite useful. The story goes that there’s a sort of “plateau” of stability in elements once they reach a certain size and complexity. And these elements are so massive and rare that they are typically only found among the remnants of extremely massive and very rare types of supernova. (Perhaps a Quark-nova?)
2300 years isn’t that long ago? Because that’s around when people knew the world wasn’t flat (Eratosthenes). And fairly accurately how large it is.
This.
Note that the words are “we have this sorted out, more or less” not “we know everything”. Though I do agree, “unknown” tends to muddle the waters much. If we can predict existence of a certain element and extrapolate its chemical and physical properties based on our knowledge, while stating that this particular element demands some bloody exotic circumstances to even have a possibility of existing – do that makes that element “unknown” if we ever will found a lump of it drifting through a space? No. Just exotic. We do not know, afaik, how to stabilize neutronium, hell – we don’t even know for sure if it exist! But we can already predict – at least partially – its properties to a degree, that allows us to theorize about properties of an armour made from it.
That’s why modern pulp-SF tends to use “dark matter”, “dark energy”, and “superstring shards” instead of “unknown elements”, “radiation viruses”, and “magnetism”. We know diddly dick about those things. We do not know if they even exist, much less how they behave. Only how they should behave to fill the gaps in particular modern theory. As for everything other about those haute couture concepts – here be photino birds.
Touching the subject of second, third, and so on “stability plateaus” – well, if half-life of an element measures in nanoseconds instead of picoseconds for its less heavy neighbor – you have a stability plateau. It’s still pretty damn hard to use an element with that much of a longevity under its belt, methinks.
Neutronium is the primary component of Neutron Stars and Pulsars (which are just spinning Neutron Stars). We certainly do know that it exists! And how it stabilizes in Nature, technically. how to stabilize it in an environment that humans could conceivably survive and find a use for it, there you are dead on. Some things that sound all science-fictiony and mysterious are simpler than they seem.
In our universe we have pretty much sorted out how things work at all but the smallest and most energetic levels. The grrlpower universe on the other hand has magic, clearly there are things there that would be completely outside our understanding of how the universe works.
Ah, you beat me tp it. Except I learned of these theoretical stable super-dense elements in high school Physics class, rather than in science fiction. Back in the late seventies, the “race was on toward these elements, since they should be stable”. Some areas our reach just exceeded our grasp at the time. Like the predictions of self-driving cars and rocket packs becoming available by the late eighties…
There are the possibilities of ‘super atoms’ that have large proton counts and can stabilize for longer than a few nanoseconds. There is a theoretical stable layout of equal electrons, protons and neutrons, in which all electron layers are filled (like the noble gasses) creating an incredibly dense element, but even in supercollider experiments it is an infinitesimal chance to occur.
An element that lasts for a few seconds or milliseconds is not much more useful than one that only last nanoseconds. You would certainly not be able to manufacture anything from it, or find it in a scan of an artifact that has existed for years.
Thank you for getting the Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde thing right.
Drives me crazy when people think Dr Jeckle was the crazy mean one.
Well, in this case, he was implying that he’s normally Mr. Hyde, and he was using a Dr. Jekyll potion to make himself behave.
This was just an example of Deus ex Maxima…
“Oh no! With Sydney turned into a rabbit and Maxima under his mind control, there’s nothing to stop Mustachio Villainoso from taking over the universe!”
Good Johnny Quest reference.
There is an upcoming, not-yet-synthesized-or-discovered trans-uranic elements which the math says should be stable. I always just put the “not-on-the-periodic-table elements” in that category. Or assume that the speaker doesn’t know the difference between “Elements” and “components”…
i like the fact that max temps fate, given magic is real is real in this universe. sympathetic magic is no joke.
and i would totally belive deus having a dr jekyll potion.
EXACTLY! That trope always bothered me too- I was gonna comment thanking you for not doing that even before I saw the description, lol.