Tag: crystal

The Fallacy of Snowflakes Being Perfectly Symmetrical

13 Comments

The 6 sided geometric symmetry observed within snowflakes is governed by the rigid molecular structure of hexagonal ice, which is the only crystalline form water can adopt within the Earth’s atmosphere, and the reason snowflakes always have 6 dendrites (points) like a hexagon. It is a common misconception that all snow crystals (snowflakes) exhibit perfect symmetry, as most often they do not possess this characteristic. It is true in the sense that at the microscopic molecular scale, snow crystals form perfectly, but it is untrue because at the macro, real world scale, anomalies virtually always form. This occurs because as the snow crystal becomes larger, water molecules no longer attach to develop and maintain a uniform orientation. Additionally, as the snow crystal grows and expands, factors of the ambient environment begin to influence it (e.g. effects of humidity and temperature etc.) causing the snow crystal to grow one way whilst in one position of a cloud and then grow in a completely different orientation once having been forcibly moved to a different spot within that same cloud. Because of this, it is rare but still possible to find a perfectly symmetrical snowflake. This explains why despite the complex and random nature of snow crystal growth, all 6 arms must align in every case and grow along the same 6 fixed 60 degree axes. If this does not occur, the snow crystal would violate the fundamental laws of energy minimization (to become most stable) dictated by the hydrogen bond lattice (framework connecting atoms within water), which would cause the structure of the snow crystal to become thermodynamically unstable and therefore highly prone to fracture

The Usage of 5D Crystals as a Means of Computational Storage

Leave a comment

Quartz is being used to create the most powerful data storage device ever developed, the 5D Superman Memory Crystal, a technology which could store data for up to 13,800,000,000 (13.8 billion) years, the calculated age of the universe. The 5D quartz crystal is a method of ensuring a large density of data can be saved within a relatively small object. This is an incredibly secure and long lasting method of saving data as the information is physically encoded into the crystal itself, remaining indefinitely until the quartz itself is destroyed, a very difficult task in and of itself. In 2018, technology entrepreneur Nova Spivack used a 5D crystal to create a permanent space library, sending it to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX Heavy Falcon rocket. Quartz is highly stable because it is a crystal, remaining unchanged for billions of years meaning if data is inserted, theoretically it could survive for billions of years. For a quartz crystal approximately 2.5 centimeters by 2.5 centimeters in diameter and 5 millimeters thick, 30 terabytes of data can be held, which is 30,000 gigabytes or 800 Blu-ray discs or 600 smartphones worth of information. This means that the entire British library could be fit into 1000 5D crystal slides, a small enough volume to fit within a single shoebox. A traditional storage medium like a compact disc, stores data in individual pixels, with 1 pixel able to hold the equivalent of 1 bit or 8 bytes of information. In a quartz drive however, each voxel can hold 8 bits or 64 bytes of information. The technology required to achieve this feat however is still in its infancy with scientists still discovering new ways to refine manufacturing, the writing and reading of data, and storage capabilities

Dating Pottery Using Thermoluminescence

Leave a comment

The dating of pottery artifacts can be accurately performed by using a technique referred to as “thermoluminescence”. Thermoluminescence involves taking a small sample of an artifact of pottery and heating it up using doses of high energy radiation which creates excited electron states in crystalline materials like pottery. In some materials, these electron states are trapped or arrested for extended periods of time by a localized defect, or imperfection. In terms of the quantum world, these states are stationary states which have no formal time dependence, however they are not stable energetically and when the material is heated it enables these trapped energy states to interact with photons to rapidly decay into lower energy states, causing the emission of photons in the process. The photons are measured and dependent of how many escape, a specified measurement of the total age can be determined. This technique can be used on most minerals and is the only method available to provide exact dating in respect to pottery as the results yielded do not have to be compared against a comparison artifact. Certain minerals store energy from the sun at a known rate and this energy is lodged in the imperfect lattices of a mineral’s crystals. Heating these crystals when creating pottery empties the stored energy reserves, after which time the mineral begins absorbing energy again. Thermoluminescence dating is a matter of comparing the current energy stored in a crystal to what should be there had not pottery not been heated during the creation process thereby establishing a “last heated during” marker or date