As a footnote, the underlying paper and research is by Phil Mason, who goes by Thunderf00t on YouTube. He posted a video of the experiment to his channel today[1].
Wonderful, thanks for sharing. I didn't know that ultra-concentrated electrons-in-ammonia solutions exist with a similarly golden hue.
10^-5 mbar atmosphere... hearing those pumps whirring and seeing those pressure gauges gave me painful flashbacks from troubleshooting leaky vacuum lines ;)
I find the tone he takes in his debunking videos pretty annoying (although I agree with him on almost all of his stances on what's a scam/vaporware and what not), but when he's actually talking about his own science/science in general he's very listenable.
The projects he goes after usually deserve some criticism, but he just keeps repeating points and generally is a little too convinced of his own superiority.
He was always a scientist and also did debunking of crowdfunding projects that promised physically impossible stuff.
And while I agree about his toxic tone - he has some points regarding feminism. For example his critique of Feminist Frequency podcast was on point ("in this game women can be killed therefore it's sexist" meanwhile in that same game you kill thousands of men and that's fine).
Sort of related: you can also obtain "dissolved electrons" by putting chips of sodium or potassium in pure ammonia.
I forgot what I used this for back in the day, but the solutions were very very beautiful. Apparently electrons dissolved in ammonia are an intense, deep blue. Photos don't really do it justice:
Interesting question, considering that they're "wet" electrons in a dynamic environment, I'd say the effect would be not so much different from applying a magnetic field to any other solution with dissolved unpaired electrons. So: fun for doing electron spin resonance studies, nothing spectacular otherwise.
Hmm, so by adding extra electrons (and ions?) to water, the water gains reflective properties.
From a bit of googling, I'm reading that reflectiveness comes from having small "band gaps" (gaps between allowed electron energy levels) for electrons to cross. Metals have small/no band gaps, while non-metals have larger ones that (if I understand correctly) don't match with the energy levels of visible light. So I assume this means that adding electrons to water changes its band structure and reduces the gap.
So is it generally true that any non-metal which gains electrons is able to absorb and release visible-wavelength photons more easily, i.e. is reflective?
So is it generally true that any non-metal which gains electrons is able to absorb and release visible-wavelength photons more easily, i.e. is reflective?
Bill Beaty has a nice ELI5-style essay on the subject at http://amasci.com/elect/charge1.html , where he discusses what electric charge is (and isn't):
"Here is a way to see charge directly: look at the surface of a wire. Metals look metallic because they contain a 'fluid' composed of movable electrons. This electrical 'fluid' is an excellent reflector of light waves, and it causes the surfaces of metals to act like mirrors. It's these same electrons which flow during an electric current. The 'silvery' stuff of a metal is the charge. What is charge? It is a 'silver liquid' which is found in all metals, and which can be forced to flow.
"Even though the charge is visible, its flow is not. Look carefully at wires in an operating electric circuit and you won't see anything moving along. This is not very mysterious: stir a glass of water and then look for the flowing motion. You'll see moving bubbles and perhaps moving specks of dirt, but you won't see the water move. The silvery charge-fluid in a wire has no bubbles or dirt, so even though the charge is visible, we cannot tell if it is moving or still."
> This electrical 'fluid' is an excellent reflector of light waves
Thanks, though I'm actually wondering about a deeper question: why is this so? Why do loose plasma-like electrons make metals reflective (or, roughly equivalently, how does adding extra electrons make a non-metal like water more reflective)?
To continue on this topic, the 'bands' I referred to are clusters of energy levels corresponding to the orbitals of the atoms. (I found this neat explanation: https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Inorganic_Chemistry/... ). Apparently, metallic reflectivity comes down to the fact that metals have overlapping "valence" and "conduction" bands. This allows electrons in the lower "valence" band to be excited to the higher "conduction" band and then fall back down and emit photons - which is reflection.
Therefore, in the case of water with extra electrons, the additional electrons may be causing the valence and conduction bands to come closer together - maybe by filling up the valence band and bringing the top of the band closer to the conduction band?
Just wanted to speculate on the chemistry of this discovery a bit, I've always found the science interesting.
I don't know if I really don't understand this or there is a confusion in the title. The shiny-metal-ness is from an already shiny metal that is forming the drop, right? The interesting thing is perhaps the fact it is golden as the water interacts with the surface, but frankly that looks very similar to other thin-film surface interactions, some of which are due to oxidisation in other reactions. Now, that this isn't the normal O2 reaction is interesting, and that there isn't a violent H2O oxidation process that normally occurs is interesting, but it just feels like 'Look! Water is shiny and metal now' is a bit ... misleading?
The title is not misleading, and the golden layer formed is metallic water and not any of the metals used -- where electrons are delocalised/shared between water molecules. They have strong evidence that the layer is indeed metallic water and not something else:
> Experiments at a synchrotron in Berlin confirmed that the gold reflections produced the signatures expected of metallic water.
In my opinion, the ingenious part of the experiment is the following part, and I'm glad that they were lucky enough to find the right conditions:
> The key to avoiding an explosion, Jungwirth says, was to find a window of time in which the diffusion of electrons was faster than the reaction between the water and the metals.
This is fucking crazy-go-nuts. This is what real-life mad science looks like. Scientists decided "yeah, water is great and all but what it really needs is a nice metallic sheen" and found a possible way to make that happen based on a technique with sodium, potassium, and ammonia. Only problem is, sodium and potassium explode in water! So now the problem became getting the metallic sheen without the explodey drawbacks... and they invested effort and funding to actually do it! Utterly mad, and brilliant.
The author of the research paper is Phil Mason (Thunderf00t on YouTube). He has another paper[1] and video[2] about making sodium+potasium explode in water.
"The researchers filled a syringe with sodium and potassium, a mixture that is liquid at room temperature, and placed it in a vacuum chamber. They then used the syringe to form droplets of the metal mixture and exposed them to small amounts of water vapour."
Why will it react slowly under these conditions? As I understand it this is just NaK + water (in vapour form), why isn't the reaction just as fast?
I wonder if it’s an [0] eutectic alloy? This property is used to make solders that melt more easily, and cast iron is easier to melt than wrought iron, which explains the name.
Because you add water more slowly, essentially atom by atom, otherwise you would have to add picoliter sized drops of water or small amounts of very fine dust of metal.
Probably the reaction is just as fast, but since they add very (very!) small amount of water, when the free electron bubbles collapse and the electrons interact with the H2O molecules the released energy is not enough to cause the usual macro scale effect (the phase change of water to steam, and thus the explosion).
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1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdz18ibX7rE&t=16s
10^-5 mbar atmosphere... hearing those pumps whirring and seeing those pressure gauges gave me painful flashbacks from troubleshooting leaky vacuum lines ;)
And while I agree about his toxic tone - he has some points regarding feminism. For example his critique of Feminist Frequency podcast was on point ("in this game women can be killed therefore it's sexist" meanwhile in that same game you kill thousands of men and that's fine).
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I forgot what I used this for back in the day, but the solutions were very very beautiful. Apparently electrons dissolved in ammonia are an intense, deep blue. Photos don't really do it justice:
https://ssl.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000lH1LMamRdV8/s/86...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_paramagnetic_resona...
From a bit of googling, I'm reading that reflectiveness comes from having small "band gaps" (gaps between allowed electron energy levels) for electrons to cross. Metals have small/no band gaps, while non-metals have larger ones that (if I understand correctly) don't match with the energy levels of visible light. So I assume this means that adding electrons to water changes its band structure and reduces the gap.
So is it generally true that any non-metal which gains electrons is able to absorb and release visible-wavelength photons more easily, i.e. is reflective?
Bill Beaty has a nice ELI5-style essay on the subject at http://amasci.com/elect/charge1.html , where he discusses what electric charge is (and isn't):
"Here is a way to see charge directly: look at the surface of a wire. Metals look metallic because they contain a 'fluid' composed of movable electrons. This electrical 'fluid' is an excellent reflector of light waves, and it causes the surfaces of metals to act like mirrors. It's these same electrons which flow during an electric current. The 'silvery' stuff of a metal is the charge. What is charge? It is a 'silver liquid' which is found in all metals, and which can be forced to flow.
"Even though the charge is visible, its flow is not. Look carefully at wires in an operating electric circuit and you won't see anything moving along. This is not very mysterious: stir a glass of water and then look for the flowing motion. You'll see moving bubbles and perhaps moving specks of dirt, but you won't see the water move. The silvery charge-fluid in a wire has no bubbles or dirt, so even though the charge is visible, we cannot tell if it is moving or still."
Thanks, though I'm actually wondering about a deeper question: why is this so? Why do loose plasma-like electrons make metals reflective (or, roughly equivalently, how does adding extra electrons make a non-metal like water more reflective)?
To continue on this topic, the 'bands' I referred to are clusters of energy levels corresponding to the orbitals of the atoms. (I found this neat explanation: https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Inorganic_Chemistry/... ). Apparently, metallic reflectivity comes down to the fact that metals have overlapping "valence" and "conduction" bands. This allows electrons in the lower "valence" band to be excited to the higher "conduction" band and then fall back down and emit photons - which is reflection.
Therefore, in the case of water with extra electrons, the additional electrons may be causing the valence and conduction bands to come closer together - maybe by filling up the valence band and bringing the top of the band closer to the conduction band?
Just wanted to speculate on the chemistry of this discovery a bit, I've always found the science interesting.
> Experiments at a synchrotron in Berlin confirmed that the gold reflections produced the signatures expected of metallic water.
In my opinion, the ingenious part of the experiment is the following part, and I'm glad that they were lucky enough to find the right conditions:
> The key to avoiding an explosion, Jungwirth says, was to find a window of time in which the diffusion of electrons was faster than the reaction between the water and the metals.
Edit: added "in my opinion".
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nchem.2161
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmlAYnFF_s8
Why will it react slowly under these conditions? As I understand it this is just NaK + water (in vapour form), why isn't the reaction just as fast?
I enjoyed "Can we have the balcony for explosions"!
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutectic_system
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