**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[MadMojoMonkey]

Hi guys! Maybe you wont mind if a monkey butts in? (monkey butts)

Chemist is right on the money when he cites current sizes and difficulty in manufacturing. (Read "difficulty" as "Even throwing millions of dollars at the worlds most intelligent and trained students and professionals isn't working that quickly.")

There are many physical problems with trying to create a crystalline structure that is 1 atom thick.

Once created, you have to deal with the fact that the exact same number of atoms NOT restricted to a plane has a lower energy. This means that even once you've isolated or grown graphene, it must be held in place to prevent it from curling, crinkling, wadding, etc. There are many 3D crystalline arrangements for the carbon atoms to form, so the graphene must be held flat everywhere... you can't just isolate certain nodes, you have to hold the whole sheet.

So even the notion of a "large" sheet of graphene holding a cat is a bit off the scale of practical. The closest you could get would be a carbon composite material, because what would be holding the cat is the worlds thinnest carbon-fiber sheet. Which is still quite cool.

Whether or not it would be transparent would depend mostly on the adhesive/substrate.

If you can touch a smooth lump of coal, then you can touch graphene. You'd destroy the surface crystal structure if you touched it with enough pressure to register on your nerves, so "feeling graphene" is a bit tricky to answer... some of the coal you crushed into your fingerprint might actually have a graphene surface... but on the whole, you're feeling coal dust.

[pantherhound]

You'd destroy the surface crystal structure if you touched it with enough pressure to register on your nerves,

Wow thanks monkey for the responses If the above is true though, are you saying my finger would go straight through it? in which case, would I effectively be breaking the bonds between the carbon atoms, and so why did whoever it was say it could support the weight of a cat?

[MadMojoMonkey]

Wow thanks monkey for the responses If the above is true though, are you saying my finger would go straight through it? in which case, would I effectively be breaking the bonds between the carbon atoms, and so why did whoever it was say it could support the weight of a cat?

I'm saying that there is no sheet of graphene that exists unsupported.

I'm saying that any smooth surface on a lump of coal probably has small sections of it that are graphene. The thing is that if you touched those smooth sections, you'd break the bonds that were holding those atoms in place.

In reality, a sheet of graphene is held by something. If you could somehow magically create a "large sheet of graphene" and you didn't hold each molecule in a sheet, then it would just crinkle up into ordinary coal.

My point is that NO, graphene can't support anything, not even itself. However, if it's held in place by some substrate, then it could be strong. I don't know. My point is that by itself it is weak, but as a carbon composite material, I don't know.

No one anywhere in the world has produced a sheet of graphene anywhere near the size of a cat, so it's probably just someone trying to phenomenalize something for attention.

***
Also, a lot of people say a lot of things about cats.

[pantherhound]

I'm saying that there is no sheet of graphene that exists unsupported.

I'm saying that any smooth surface on a lump of coal probably has small sections of it that are graphene. The thing is that if you touched those smooth sections, you'd break the bonds that were holding those atoms in place.

In reality, a sheet of graphene is held by something. If you could somehow magically create a "large sheet of graphene" and you didn't hold each molecule in a sheet, then it would just crinkle up into ordinary coal.

My point is that NO, graphene can't support anything, not even itself. However, if it's held in place by some substrate, then it could be strong. I don't know. My point is that by itself it is weak, but as a carbon composite material, I don't know.

No one anywhere in the world has produced a sheet of graphene anywhere near the size of a cat, so it's probably just someone trying to phenomenalize something for attention.

***
Also, a lot of people say a lot of things about cats.

OK cool.

If I as a human being was the size of a neutrino and I was suspended in mid air by some sort of sub-atomic structure commensurate to my size, and I was in a normal human-sized office, would I be able to see anything? If so, what?

What about if I was the size of a carbon atom?

[MadMojoMonkey]

OK cool.

If I as a human being was the size of a neutrino and I was suspended in mid air by some sort of sub-atomic structure commensurate to my size, and I was in a normal human-sized office, would I be able to see anything? If so, what?

What about if I was the size of a carbon atom?

A) this makes no sense. The complexity of a human being can not be expressed by any known particles on such a scale.

If you had a mass that tiny, a photon would hit you like a bus. Photons carry momentum proportional to their energy, and if your mass is small enough, then the absorption of that momentum will noticeably accelerate you.

Even if we could magically shrink a human to that size... we have all kinds of other considerations in how quantum mechanics deals with the very tiny... assuming we could somehow break physics for only you to be so small, with all your normal particles masses and charges... then we can't at all talk about how something from outside that physics-space interacts with you.

What happens to the "normal" photon when it enters your "tiny" eye? Does the normal photon become tiny, so that you can see it, or does the normal photon basically wash right past you, since you are far too small for it to interact with, and you have no significant conductive properties... and even if you were electrically charged, your mass is such that it can't easily impart it's momentum to you by waving you violently in a transverse manner... so it might not interact with you at all.

It's a dead end.

Things that are so tiny can not have "eyes", much less a mind capable of interpreting chemical stimulus as vision.

Can you reformulate the question into something that doesn't break physics in the assumption?

[pantherhound]

Can you reformulate the question into something that doesn't break physics in the assumption?

No
Explain string theory to me, but in a poem.

[MadMojoMonkey]

No
Explain string theory to me, but in a poem.

No

There are a bunch of posts about string theory ITT. The thing to remember about string theory is that there are a ton of them and none of them is a theory... they're all hypotheses. In order to be a theory, it has to be widely accepted and tested.

I'm not digging through the thread to find exact posts, but if you just ctrl-f and search for my posts, it wont take you too long.

TL;DR - there are a lot of string theorists, none of whom has yet to produce a string theory. String theory is a hypothetical way of making sense of quantum mechanics and general relativity with a unified mathematical framework.