What good is strange matter?

[james_davis_nicoll]

That is, if we knew where we could put our hands on some locally, what could we do with it?

Comments

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Increase surrealism in focused areas?

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

Heck, I can do that all on my own!

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

One could use globs of negatively charged strange matter to destroy (or at least convert to strange matter) planets and stars, could one not?

[del-c.livejournal.com]

This is frustrating. I used to have an index of Analog articles I could search and now I don't, but I seem to recall an article about the odd sorts of things you could make with various kinds of matter if you had it. Superheavy atoms with the chemical properties of their regular counterparts of the fraction of the mass, and so on.

It's almost certainly not this article...

Wil McCarthy "Beyond the Periodic Table: Artificial Atoms and Programmable Matter" Analog (January 2002)

...because I don't have the Jan 2002 Analog (I have few after Dec 96), and also because I've seen McCarthy talking about this and he's talking about something else: "quantum dots" made up of collections of normal atoms.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

That is, if we knew where we could put our hands on some locally, what could we do with it?

...Make very dense things?

I haven't paid much attention to this since the Eighties, when I heard some talks speculating that stable atoms with (many?) strange quarks in their nuclei could exist. If so, a whole new chemistry of more dense atoms might be a consequence.

del_c writes:

but I seem to recall an article about the odd sorts of things you could make with various kinds of matter if you had it. Superheavy atoms with the chemical properties of their regular counterparts of the fraction of the mass, and so on.

This seems like bob Forward's sort of thing, or maybe John Cramer's, but that doesn't narrow things down helpfully. Try checking Indistinguishable from Magic, perhaps?