Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

OMG, the second half of the game where the world becomes quite open and all backstories are revealed, is one of the best gaming moments ever.

Ciro Santilli likes Magic: The Gathering and he was pleased when he learned that Steve Wozniak does too, and has an expensive collection: redsunsoft.com/2019/03/how-a-post-to-play-magictg-turned-into-an-afternoon-with-the-woz/

SGML predecessor.

Two parallel Josephson junctions.

In Ciro's ASCII art circuit diagram notation:

I like relativistic quantum mechanics.

Best mathematical explanation: Section "Spin comes naturally when adding relativity to quantum mechanics".

Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015) chapter 3.9 "Elementary particles" has an amazing summary of the preceding chapters the spin value has a relation to the representations of the Lorentz group, which encodes the spacetime symmetry that each particle observes. These symmetries can be characterized by small integer numbers:As usual, we don't know why there aren't elementary particles with other spins, as we could construct them.

Bibliography:

Initially a phenomenological guess to explain the periodic table. Later it was apparently proven properly with the spin-statistics theorem, physics.stackexchange.com/questions/360140/theoretical-proof-of-paulis-exclusion-principle.

And it was understood more and more that basically this is what prevents solids from collapsing into a single nucleus, not electrical repulsion: electron degeneracy pressure!

Bibliography:

NIST database for spectral line: physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/ASD/lines_form.html

Let's do a sanity check.

Searching for "H" for hydrogen leads to: physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/ASD/lines1.pl?spectra=H&limits_type=0&low_w=&upp_w=&unit=1&submit=Retrieve+Data&de=0&format=0&line_out=0&en_unit=0&output=0&bibrefs=1&page_size=15&show_obs_wl=1&show_calc_wl=1&unc_out=1&order_out=0&max_low_enrg=&show_av=2&max_upp_enrg=&tsb_value=0&min_str=&A_out=0&intens_out=on&max_str=&allowed_out=1&forbid_out=1&min_accur=&min_intens=&conf_out=on&term_out=on&enrg_out=on&J_out=on

From there we can see for example the 1 to 2 lines:

We see that the table is sorted from lower from level first and then by upper level second.

So it is good to see that we are in the same 121nm ballpark as mentioned at hydrogen spectral line.

TODO why I can't see 2s to 2p transitions there to get the fine structure?

Bibliography:

Split in energy levels due to interaction between electron up or down spin and the electron orbitals.

Numerically explained by the Dirac equation when solving it for the hydrogen atom, and it is one of the main triumphs of the theory.

Split in the spectral line when a magnetic field is applied.

Non-anomalous: number of splits matches predictions of the Schrödinger equation about the number of possible states with a given angular momentum. TODO does it make numerical predictions?

Anomalous: evidence of spin.

www.pas.rochester.edu/~blackman/ast104/zeeman-split.html contains the hello world that everyone should know: 2p splits into 3 energy levels, so you see 3 spectral lines from 1s to 2p rather than just one.

p splits into 3, d into 5, f into 7 and so on, i.e. one for each possible azimuthal quantum number.

It also mentions that polarization effects become visible from this: each line is polarized in a different way. TODO more details as in an experiment to observe this.

Well explained at: Video "Quantum Mechanics 7a - Angular Momentum I by ViaScience (2013)".

Basically a synonym for doing a large chunk of de novo DNA synthesis.

Man-made virus!

TODO: if we had cheap de novo DNA synthesis, how hard would it be to bootstrap a virus culture from that? github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/60

Is it easy to transfect a cell with the synthesized DNA, and get it to generate full infectious viral particles?

If so, then de novo DNA synthesis would be very similar to 3D printed guns: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printed_firearms.

It might already be possible to order dissimulated sequences online: