I was gonna work on music, but this has got me all twitterpated (which has a brand new meaning these days). Ladies, gents and other, I give you the Allosphere.
But the most amazing thing here isn’t even the Allosphere – and as impressive as the visualization of the hydrogen atom and as amazing as the laser interferometry of electron orbits are (the first time in history that the orbits of individual electrons have had their paths mapped instead of just the outer force-field sensed, as far as I know) – the hydrogen bonding part is what really gets me.
In nature, hydrogen bonds once. That’s what we’re taught in school. It has one electron, and can form one electron bond-pair with it. Hydrogen gas is such an element, H2O (water) is another, all singly-bonded hydrogen atoms. It just doesn’t work any other way. Such is what I was taught last year in chemistry, and the girl is learning it this year. But that’s not the whole truth. In some cases, hydrogen can apparently bond multiply. Scientists have now achieved quadruply-bonded hydrogen.
Does anyone know what makes carbon and silicon so special? They bond quadruply. That leads to their awesome properties of semiconductance and the carbon sp2 orbital bonding that gives rise to the molecule we know as diamond. These crazy guys have induced hydrogen to bond with 4 zinc atoms and used this material to make transparent solar cells. Hydrogen bonded with metal yielding a transparent substance? Triple bonding was still an unproved concept in the early nineties, as near as my quick scour of google can tell. This is black quantum voodoo.
This is the future – making nature our bitch. We’ve organized hydrogen in ways that currently can’t exist in nature as we know it. The periodic table is organized because of the bonding characteristics of atoms. Hydrogen’s sometimes a floater – and now may even belong in it’s own special class? This is straight science fiction – in Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling wrote of “stabilized metallic hydrogen” used as the shell of a starship. When I was young, that was “wicked cool,” as I grew up and learned, it became “preposterous, but sounds cool enough for sci-fi,” and then I learned some more and suddenly it seems “possible.” Talk about a holy sh*t moment.
It’s times like this that financial and governmental trouble and upset seem small as these quantum phenomena really are.
This is the birth of the nanotech era – and it’s gonna be crazier than we could have possibly imagined. All births are fragile times – but hey, life has had several hundred million years to sit around and devise ways to preserve itself.
Tags: how crazy does that shit look?, i, nerd with a capital N, wild speculation, yes please i'd like it now