As nerdy as HN is it's safe to assume this is on the front page because the name sounds funny not because the majority are secretly spending years of their lives going deep into things like molecular studies posted in Nature.
Alternatively, people upvote things which are intellectually interesting. Discoveries like this are interesting to read about even if you're not a molecular scientist.
They're flagged; let's resist now. This kind of thing is sort of at the midpoint between these two HN guidelines:
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
This is experimental confirmation of existing accepted theories
"The confirmation of the existence of the π-hole, as well as the σ-hole before it, fully demonstrates the quality of the theoretical predictions of quantum chemistry, which have accounted for both phenomena for decades."
For Chemistry: Reading the paper, it looks like DFT[1] gets the same result than the experiments. It's nice to confirm DFT in a weird scenario, but it's not groundbreaking. There are a few versions and parameters to tweak in DFT, so it may help to choose the right one for similar molecules, but I'm not an expert in DFT.
Black holes: That was totally hyperbole. I chuckle. It looks like people have been using pi-holes to predict the strength of the bound between molecules [2]. It's nice to be able to "see" them in a real example, but doesn't look groundbreaking. (There is always a small possibility that this technique is improved and in a few years everyone is using it to identify molecules or something like that. I don't expect that, but you never know. Sometimes experimental results create a complete new branch.)
Would it no be comparable to "seeing" the first black hole long after predicting them? AFAIK we knew black holes exists long before we finally were able to observe them. (And we still dont see them, just their effects).
Is it the same way here? We knew it exists, we can use that knowledge to describe things better, but we were unable to snap a picture, until now?
Still not sure if thats what the article meant, just curious.
I work in Quantum Chemistry (aka Math Applied to Molecular Physics) so I see somewhat similar stuff every other day.
The problem is that if the predictions by computer were wrong, it would have been too easy to spot differences in many other cases, like the energy of some molecules, or the angles of the atoms of other molecules, or the reactions or other molecules. The exact calculations are horrible slow, but there are good enough approximations like DFT and some other methods that are more accurate but too slow to be applied to big molecules (like O(N^12) where N is the number of atoms, or if you are not a purist N is 5 times the number of atoms, or something like that because the details are more complicated). Anyway, the result is an infinite sum of slater determinants, but usually a few are enough. There is very little room for surprises.
I'm not an astronomer, so I have less idea about possible problems with black holes. It seams that the neutron stars have a lot of internal structure near the surface, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pasta because in the surface you have a mix of neutrons and protons. In the center, it may possible have a mix of normal mater and matter made also with the strange quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter So there are a lot of weird things we don't understand completely and may case neutron star to avoid being crushed into a black hole. Also, at very high gravity forces, we must consider quantum gravity, that is a theory we had no t discovered yet. We discovered many black holes so all these problems I imagine are not so problematic. But anyway, there is a lot of internal structure that could have been a problem until they got a confirmation.
Two things wrong here: (1) they didn't use an electron microscope, and (2) the microscope they did use was made by a German company Created Gmbh.
This experiment was not done with an electron microscope, which shoots free electrons at a material at very high energies. Instead, they used "Kelvin Force Probe" microscopy which basically measures the electrostatic force from atoms on an ultra-fine tip of metal. Sounds crazy, but it's a technique that has been around for decades.
Which looks like an auto-correct issue - I regularly curse when a correctly spelled word (perhaps including partial capitalisation) is "helpfully" corrected to a valid word that is meaningless nonsense.
40 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 93.5 ms ] threadAs nerdy as HN is it's safe to assume this is on the front page because the name sounds funny not because the majority are secretly spending years of their lives going deep into things like molecular studies posted in Nature.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's difficult to gauge the actual impact from the hyperbole in the article (similar to discovery of black holes, etc).
"The confirmation of the existence of the π-hole, as well as the σ-hole before it, fully demonstrates the quality of the theoretical predictions of quantum chemistry, which have accounted for both phenomena for decades."
For Material Science: very little
For Chemistry: Reading the paper, it looks like DFT[1] gets the same result than the experiments. It's nice to confirm DFT in a weird scenario, but it's not groundbreaking. There are a few versions and parameters to tweak in DFT, so it may help to choose the right one for similar molecules, but I'm not an expert in DFT.
Black holes: That was totally hyperbole. I chuckle. It looks like people have been using pi-holes to predict the strength of the bound between molecules [2]. It's nice to be able to "see" them in a real example, but doesn't look groundbreaking. (There is always a small possibility that this technique is improved and in a few years everyone is using it to identify molecules or something like that. I don't expect that, but you never know. Sometimes experimental results create a complete new branch.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_functional_theory
[2] I made a search in google, and I cherry-picked these articles https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8003638/ https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/cp/d1cp0...
Is it the same way here? We knew it exists, we can use that knowledge to describe things better, but we were unable to snap a picture, until now?
Still not sure if thats what the article meant, just curious.
We just have more creative and accurate visualization of sensor data, somewhat far from what we could see or photograph in the visible spectrum.
The problem is that if the predictions by computer were wrong, it would have been too easy to spot differences in many other cases, like the energy of some molecules, or the angles of the atoms of other molecules, or the reactions or other molecules. The exact calculations are horrible slow, but there are good enough approximations like DFT and some other methods that are more accurate but too slow to be applied to big molecules (like O(N^12) where N is the number of atoms, or if you are not a purist N is 5 times the number of atoms, or something like that because the details are more complicated). Anyway, the result is an infinite sum of slater determinants, but usually a few are enough. There is very little room for surprises.
I'm not an astronomer, so I have less idea about possible problems with black holes. It seams that the neutron stars have a lot of internal structure near the surface, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pasta because in the surface you have a mix of neutrons and protons. In the center, it may possible have a mix of normal mater and matter made also with the strange quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter So there are a lot of weird things we don't understand completely and may case neutron star to avoid being crushed into a black hole. Also, at very high gravity forces, we must consider quantum gravity, that is a theory we had no t discovered yet. We discovered many black holes so all these problems I imagine are not so problematic. But anyway, there is a lot of internal structure that could have been a problem until they got a confirmation.
I’m able to continually confirm the existence of a near infinite number of a-holes, though.
Is this research then relevant to charges moving through DNA or proteins?
but I dont think this is a very good addition to the article, it just confuses concepts that aren't related
This experiment was not done with an electron microscope, which shoots free electrons at a material at very high energies. Instead, they used "Kelvin Force Probe" microscopy which basically measures the electrostatic force from atoms on an ultra-fine tip of metal. Sounds crazy, but it's a technique that has been around for decades.