Thursday, November 26, 2009

 

JSH: My sphere packing idea

I noted a little while back that back around 1996 I came up with what I think is a solution to the sphere packing problem, which relied on only basic algebra. At that time I wrote a paper and sent it to a math journal where the editor told me it was too simple, and it was not published.

I lost that paper (I tend to lose things as part of an on-going experiment to see what historical impact it might have) but in recollecting my ideas recently I posted what I THINK the solution was on my math blog, where now that blog post comes up for me with a Google search in the top 10. But the Google search (has to be Google) is:

spherical packing problem

I posted about this before and the newsgroup subject I made took over and dropped the blog page out of the top 10 for a while so I've been a little more creative with the thread subject title this time so that doesn't happen.

Now why is any of this significant to a physics newsgroup?

Well if the approach I found IS viable then in materials science it could allow researchers to determine the properties of mixing different things together by computer more easily than previously realized and even tell them things like if they'd have a glass, or a crystal, and if a crystal what its minimal configuration would be.

That is, the result could be HUGE for any nation that used it instead of whatever the hell is the supposed best in the world to advance its own materials science program.

But it could be junk.

History can turn on JUST this result, while I have lots of these type results so I can just chatter about them from time to time.

I am looking at times out for news of research results in materials science to see evidence of the use of the simplified mathematical approach.

If correct, a materials scientist could build materials with special properties that others could not ever build, as the computer could easily cycle through endless "experiments" that could check countless combinations faster than any other approach possibly could.

If someone is using this thing, they will quite simply, take over the field of materials science.

I'm just kind of waiting for that to happen and collecting responses with posts like this one in the interim: kind of a hobby.





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