Month: September 2022

PERSISTENT VITALIST WORDS. “Naturalists trying to explain living processes like generation and growth drew on a language of active principles to explain how matter could come to organise itself. Apothecaries, herbalists, and chemists also used a language of principles when studying the virtues of plants, although it was not always clear what they meant.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

THE FLOATING WORLD. “Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre have characterised the classification of chemical materials in this period as multidimensional, moving back and forth between the imperceptible (vital or inert) and perceptible (having or not having an effect upon the animal economy).” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

PURGING LANGUAGE. “When Antoine Lavoisier, Antoine-François Fourcroy, Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau and Claude Berthollet put forth their revolutionary new nomenclature in 1787, they were proposing not only a new system of naming, but one of classification as well, which exemplified a shift towards considering the fundamental, hidden principles of nature, rather than the effects that a substance produced. “Principles” now referred to the ultimate constituents of matter: hydrogen, oxygen, etc.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

CHEMICAL WORDS. “The new nomenclature left little space for speaking of the non-material aspects of substances. It took particular aim at the term “spirit,” with its connotations of immaterial transcendence. In its place, they proposed “alcohol,” reviving an Arabic term derived from Egyptian kohl which had referred generally to any chemical decoction.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

BARELY COMPREHENSIBLE. “In theoretical terms, a color superconducting phase is a state in which the quarks near the Fermi surface become correlated in Cooper pairs, which condense. In phenomenological terms, a color superconducting phase breaks some of the symmetries of the underlying theory, and has a very different spectrum of excitations and very different transport properties from the normal phase.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_superconductivity View in LinkedIn

COMPACT STARS. “Unlike an electrical superconductor, color-superconducting quark matter comes in many varieties, each of which is a separate phase of matter. This is because quarks, unlike electrons, come in many species. There are three different colors (red, green, blue) and in the core of a compact star we expect three different flavors (up, down, strange), making nine species in all. Thus in forming the Cooper pairs there is a 9×9 color-flavor matrix of possible pairing patterns. The differences between these patterns are very physically significant: different patterns break different symmetries of the underlying theory, leading to different excitation spectra and different transport properties.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_superconductivity View in LinkedIn

SUPER CONDENSED MATTER. “Ordinary matter, also referred to as atomic matter, is composed of atoms, with nearly all matter concentrated in the atomic nuclei. Nuclear matter is a liquid composed of neutrons and protons, and they are themselves composed of up and down quarks. Quark matter is a condensed form of matter composed entirely of quarks. If quark matter contains strange quarks, it is often called strange matter (or strange quark matter), and when quark matter does not contain strange quarks, it is sometimes referred to as non-strange quark matter.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter View in LinkedIn