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Comment Re:"Why is the sky blue?" - Not so easy... (Score 1) 656

And indeed, if you understand Rayleigh scattering and why shorter wavelengths are scattered more strongly, then the natural question becomes: Why isn't the sky purple? While I've never measured the spectrum of the daytime sky, I imagine it must have a large violet component but that our eyes/brain perceive the color as blue.

Comment Re:Really? Even for blackbody radiation? (Score 1) 65

Blackbody radiation is an approximation, assuming that a material can emit a spectrum of photons of different energies. All light is a result of moving charge, most commonly from electronic transitions, and when you take into account the actual quantum physics of an atom or group of atoms (macroscopic material), you won't get actual blackbody radiation. For example a perfect (pure) semiconductor at a high temperature will not emit light with energy less than the band gap energy, but for energies above the band gap it will look roughly like a blackbody.

Comment Interesting... (Score 4, Insightful) 201

That's truly fascinating if they can tolerate such a large magnetic field. While we may rarely need to tolerate 45 tesla magnetic fields in practice, the physics behind this must be new to our experience. Unexplained experimental results always spark interesting theoretical work, possibly leading to more practical materials.

Scanning the paper, it seemed to have little bearing on this magnetic field tolerance, but rather talked about the effects of grain boundaries. Did anyone understand how the paper related to the press release?

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