What the heck is the point of this?

[Daniel Y.]

I was reading the following article on Physorg:

http://physorg.com/news125146806.html

It basically says that one may be able to push the nucleus out of the atom out and leave the electrons orbiting in their normal paths for a tad bit of time, and then repel each other 'after the electrons figure out their nucleus is gone' in a manner of speaking.

I don't know if I missed it in the article, but - why? Who the freak cares if you can do that? Supposing this *is* possible, why would this be useful? Thanks.

 

[lightarrow]

I was reading the following article on Physorg:

http://physorg.com/news125146806.html

It basically says that one may be able to push the nucleus out of the atom out and leave the electrons orbiting in their normal paths for a tad bit of time, and then repel each other 'after the electrons figure out their nucleus is gone' in a manner of speaking.

I don't know if I missed it in the article, but - why? Who the freak cares if you can do that? Supposing this *is* possible, why would this be useful? Thanks.

Don't know, but it's very interesting; maybe you could stabilize such an "atom" giving periodically a positive charge to the center of it, so you could, in theory, have a stable cloud of electron(s) without much average positive charge in it, this means that you would be able to stabilize a "complex" with total average non-zero charge. Just a speculation.

 

[Claude Bile]

Not everything scientists research has an immediate practical benefit. It may be decades before the practical benefits of such research can be realized.

When the laser was first developed it had no practical uses at all. No one could have possibly envisaged the wide range of applications lasers are used for today.

Claude.

 

[clouded.perception]

I was reading the following article on Physorg:

http://physorg.com/news125146806.html

It basically says that one may be able to push the nucleus out of the atom out and leave the electrons orbiting in their normal paths for a tad bit of time, and then repel each other 'after the electrons figure out their nucleus is gone' in a manner of speaking.

I don't know if I missed it in the article, but - why? Who the freak cares if you can do that? Supposing this *is* possible, why would this be useful? Thanks.

Why? Because we can.

These sorts of things sometimes turn out to be quite useful a couple of decades down the track. A 19th century physicist would probably react the same if you told them about the particle accelerator.

 

[DocZaius]

I was reading the following article on Physorg:

http://physorg.com/news125146806.html

It basically says that one may be able to push the nucleus out of the atom out and leave the electrons orbiting in their normal paths for a tad bit of time, and then repel each other 'after the electrons figure out their nucleus is gone' in a manner of speaking.

I don't know if I missed it in the article, but - why? Who the freak cares if you can do that? Supposing this *is* possible, why would this be useful? Thanks.

At the most, it will be a breakthrough concerning learning more about the fundamental laws of physics. At the very least it will be an experiment that will either support or refute hypotheses. Either way, it's helpful since we want a good hypothesis to be supported and a bad one to be refuted, and this will do either.