Lost Dimension Yields Accidental Discovery

Bjorn Carey
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
53 minutes ago

Using strong magnets and a pigment developed by ancient Chinese warriors, scientists turned a three-dimensional system into one with just two dimensions.

The transformation was accidental, but it provides physical evidence for several theories and might help scientists build faster computers.

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"Han purple" is a pigment used more than 2,000 years ago to color Xi'an terra cotta warriors of the Qian Dynasty. Scientists know the pigment as BaCuSi2O6—a highly symmetric crystal structure consisting of layers of spinning atoms.

In high magnetic fields and temperatures between minus 454 and minus 457 degrees Fahrenheit, magnetic waves in Han purple crystals exist in three dimensions. But when the researchers chilled the pigment closer to minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit—which scientists consider to be absolute zero—the magnetic waves merged into one large, undulating pulse that was restricted from the up-down dimension by the crystal's copper layers.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060602/sc_space/lostdimensionyieldsaccidentaldiscovery

fold that pigment in Half? Does the pulse go around a corner? Straight across?

May be a way of "folding" space..

...do any origami with that pigment. It could rupture the fabric of space-time itself!

"It could cause a chain reaction and kill us all!"

First heard it on an MST, but I find it works with everything from forgetting to turn off a light to failure to set the parking brake.

folded paper units kids made to divine the future.. choose a color, flip flip flip flip.. now choose a number.. flip flip flip..

"You're going to marry a DOCTOR!"

They had an episode on South Park where they had to get one of those away from the girls, it was pretty funny :)

I wound my daughter up one day by doing a similar trick with a hexaflexagon ...
she was mildly confused when I kept producing these previously unseen faces
from an object that looked like one of those "choice" things ... especially
when the range of choices started to include "physicist", "topologist" ...
:-)