ReylanWolf
Massimo 
If you take a Petri dish, castor oil and some ball bearings and put all in an electric field, you might happen to spot an interesting behavior: self-assembling wires who appear to be almost alive
[📹 Stanford Complexity Group]
Netraven@Rainmaker1973 energy is life, or some shit.
panu@Rainmaker1973
Okay, so can somebody please explain the science behind this? I'm guessing it has something to do with the electricity finding the path of least resistance, kinda like how lightning strikes where it strikes, or something. By how/why is it able to _make_ the path for itself, as appears to be happening here?
Okay, so can somebody please explain the science behind this? I'm guessing it has something to do with the electricity finding the path of least resistance, kinda like how lightning strikes where it strikes, or something. By how/why is it able to _make_ the path for itself, as appears to be happening here?
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UKhere is a more detailed video of the experiment - you need 20 000 volts for it to happen - it is likely that magnetic fields are attracting the balls, although the paths they take are still under investigation (unfortunately Professor Alfred Hübler passed away in 2018).
It *is* possible to try it at home if you can get a 20 kV supply and have the space and knowledge to do the experiment safely 😉
Self-Assembling Wires
Nicole Parsons@vfrmedia @shadowdancer @Rainmaker1973
The overlap between complexity theory and chaos theory must be fascinating.
Eagerly awaiting more papers on these subjects!
mrg@Npars01 @vfrmedia @shadowdancer @Rainmaker1973 A several decades ago (so please take this with not just one grain of salt) I attended lecture about complexity theory and biology and the professor said something like "life is basically a dissipative structure suspended in the energy potential between the infalling sunshine and the outgoing heat radiation" so, in analogy, would these complex structures self-organize to dissipate the electrical potential over the dish?
@vfrmedia
Yeah I was thinking magnetism might be at play here to some extent, but it seems it's really not understood how / why the balls arrange themselves in the specific patterns they seem to be doing.
@Rainmaker1973
Yeah I was thinking magnetism might be at play here to some extent, but it seems it's really not understood how / why the balls arrange themselves in the specific patterns they seem to be doing.
@Rainmaker1973
Pieter Kuiper 🌍🇳🇱@vfrmedia @shadowdancer @Rainmaker1973 Before there is the connecting path there is no current so no magnetic fields. The conducting balls are moved by electrostatic fields. Those fields change when the balls move and touch.
Then when a connecting path is formed (percolation) maybe the magnetic fields are strong enough to move the balls in a different direction so that the path gets broken up again?
Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen@shadowdancer @Rainmaker1973 the phenomenon is known as dielectrophoresis. particles able to move about a dielectric medium (here, the castor oil) which is subjected to a non-uniform electric field (here, supplied by the ring electrode at the edge of the dish and the point electrode in the center) acquire a dipole moment and are thus tugged about by electrostatic attraction towards regions of greater field strength (in this case, round the central electrode.)
rtn@Rainmaker1973 Fascinating! They also break apart and re-arrange.
Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈@Rainmaker1973 "I have created Life!" - AI bullshitter
Embrace Civil Disobedience@Rainmaker1973 If you've ever looked at live bacteria under a microscope, it looks a lot like this. 😂
peachfrontyikes!!!!!
viernullvier
Willow 🏳️⚧️🏴🇵🇸@Rainmaker1973 and they claim magic doesn’t exist.
Pino Carafa@Rainmaker1973 I guess that similar patterns are part of what drives some of the behaviours we can observe in actual life?
955_36@Rainmaker1973 You can observe much of the same behavior with a simple bowl of milk and some Cheerios. Baffled me as a kid, but now I know it's just surface tension working it's wonders.
Adrian W@Rainmaker1973 I wonder whether some of the resulting patterns made by the ball bearings share similarities with the burn patterns you get when you send an electric current through a piece of wood? Some of it looks sort of similar to me.
bit101@Rainmaker1973
Boston Robotics is going to hook this up to an LLM and we're all going to die
Boston Robotics is going to hook this up to an LLM and we're all going to die
TripTilt /// tt