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Old December 15, 2009, 04:07 PM   #1
johnwilliamson062
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Glass cannon

In a discussion of the state of glass, I told a physicist I thought he had convinced me of the verity of his statement and that in order to demonstrate that glass was in fact an inert gas we should launch a block from a Gilardoni air rifle in order to show how the gas would weave around his "steely abs". I figured someone on this site might actually understand his reply.
Quote:
what i'm trying to say is that gas is a glass which can be fired as a cannon from a SABOT tube. at those temperatures and pressures, it quickly follows bose-einstein condensate statistics and develops vortices which would allow it to move around my (steely) abdomen. After that (and because of my own personal electromagnetic interference) the gas-glass would follow heisenburg's uncertainty principle and disappear like children visiting Neverland.
Ignore the obvious writing deficiencies.
This is what i get for talking to someone who starts their facebook name with Dr. and ends it with XI even though they aren't an MD or a superhero...

Last edited by johnwilliamson062; December 15, 2009 at 04:17 PM.
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Old December 15, 2009, 04:29 PM   #2
TangoMcBlasty
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Are you sure this guy is a physicist? He may have just spent too much time on Wikipedia. His buzzwords are "real" but those phenomena occur at the subatomic scale... which means you lasers and magnets not glass projectiles and air cannons.
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Old December 15, 2009, 04:39 PM   #3
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I'd go with Boltzmann statistics first. Me thinks we're talking a lot of gas that was generated behind his steely abs and then disappeared following Fick's law.
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Old December 15, 2009, 04:42 PM   #4
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Sometimes there's a lot of comfort in being a dumbass. I think this is one of them.
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Old December 15, 2009, 05:27 PM   #5
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Glass isn't a gas. It's not a fluid, either. It's an amorphous solid. Even if it was a fluid, it still wouldn't be a gas. Gases have neither volume constancy nor shape constancy, and glass has both. Even if it was a supercooled liquid, it would still have volume constancy, which would make it not a gas.
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Old December 15, 2009, 06:02 PM   #6
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Quote:
It's not a fluid, either. It's an amorphous solid. Even if it was a fluid, it still wouldn't be a gas.
But common glass is a liquid, a very high viscosity liquid. It flows at STP (something solids do not do), and has no crystal structure at all.

But what does this have to do with firearms?
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Old December 15, 2009, 06:07 PM   #7
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Quote:
In a discussion of the state of glass, I told a physicist I thought he had convinced me of the verity of his statement and that in order to demonstrate that glass was in fact an inert gas we should launch a block from a Gilardoni air rifle in order to show how the gas would weave around his "steely abs".
You didn't suggest he compress some glass and use its sudden release from a containment chamber as a source of propellant for your projectile?

His "steely abs" would be safe after such an experiment, I'm pretty sure.

Never seen glass that can compress or expand. Every time as a kid I experimented with such, the surface tension ruptured and I lost my allowance for several weeks.
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Old December 15, 2009, 06:14 PM   #8
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Scorch,

Glass is an amorphous solid. No one calls amorphous steel a "supercooled liquid" even though it has the same lack of crystalline structure as glass. Then again, most glass isn't pure silicon dioxide, soda and lime are added in large quantities to prevent crystalization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass

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Old December 15, 2009, 06:15 PM   #9
impalacustom
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In theory it makes sense as Bose-Einstein condensate's don't follow normal laws. It takes extreme cold to get to a Bose-Einstein condensate though. They tend to flow through things that liquids in normal states can not flow through. It's not osmosis either, Bose-Einstein condensate's are very rare animals and don't last very long.

There is no way to make a projectile out of a Bose-Einstein condensate though, at least not yet.
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Old December 15, 2009, 07:21 PM   #10
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johnwilliamson062,

The guy is full of it. Heisenbergs uncertainty principle only has to do with velocity and location of electrons. You can measure one, but not the other. Or as in most quantum physics, observing something changes it.

A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is just another state of matter, adding to the common solid, liquid, gas, and plasma states. From lowest energy to highest energy we would go BEC, solid, liquid, gas, plasma.

The problem is that BEC are made by cooling gasses to the point that you tweak the probabilities of a quantum state to the lower energy state, allowing repulsive gasses to not be repulsive gasses.

The state of matter does not change the mass of matter, so shooting anything is not massless will have an effect any other massive obect that it collides with. As far as shooting a BEC it isn't going to happen any time soon.

So it sounds like Dr. XI (he's cranked the amplitude up to ELEVEN! spinaltap reference) needs to either go back to school, or go back on his meds.

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Old December 15, 2009, 07:28 PM   #11
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Quote:
The guy is full of it. Heisenbergs uncertainty principle only has to do with velocity and location of electrons. You can measure one, but not the other. Or as in most quantum physics, observing something changes it.
Perhaps Dr. XI is referring to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in the capacity that he may either shoot himself in the abdomen with a large piece of glass or live to tell about it, but not both.
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Old December 15, 2009, 09:22 PM   #12
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Spock, shut up.

And I want my click back
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Old December 15, 2009, 09:25 PM   #13
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Well, I'm personally going to apply the Irwin Certainty Principle...

Irwin is CERTAIN that this subject, while really interesting, isn't on topic anywhere at TFL...

So, closed.
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