John Carlos Baez on Nostr: It gets cooler when you look closer. Blue bronze is made of chains of octahedra. Each ...

It gets cooler when you look closer. Blue bronze is made of chains of octahedra. Each chain acts like a crystal in 1-dimensional space. Physics in 1d space is weirdly different than in higher dimensions. The electric charge along each chain naturally settles down in a wavy pattern (the 'Peierls instability').

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