May I introduce myself to you? My name is Kalle Lintinen and I am the chief technological officer of LignoSphere Company.
I have decided to write a science blog about the quantum world and strings, but hopefully in a way that is accessible to people who are allergic to equations, but are curious about the world.
You see, our company aims to turn the side stream of the pulp and paper industry into products that replace oil-based products and to do that, I've had to learn quite a bit of the mysteries of the natural world. So much so, in fact, that I'm still in the process of convincing the scientific community of my findings. But not because what I've found is so hard, but because it sounds too easy to be true.
What I've found is that quantum mechanics is simpler than anyone could have imagined and it all boils down to my realization that molecules never move freely.
But before going any further, let me introduce the new kid on the block:
say hello to the supramolecular orbital!
What you see above is something that enables us to make our product, but whose existence at the time I write this is known by me and only a handful of people.
While I can't reveal how this helps our company, what I can reveal is that all molecules form a supramolecular orbital. It might not always be as pretty as the one above, but it is what explains how chemistry works. And not only chemistry, but physics and biology as well.
In this first post I can only scratch at the surface of the discovery. The biggest and probably the most controversial claim I have is that light is a particle with mass. And the second biggest claim is that the postulate of free movement of gaseuous molecules is wrong. And the concept of supramolecular orbital is a far third.
It's hard to be brief in explaining how I found this out, but it all started in the spring of 2020 with the Covid lockdown. I was working on a project that would become our company.
Due to the lockdown I couldn't get to the lab to do experimental work. So, I had to think.
We were working on ways to turn poorly understood biopolymer, lignin, into coatings and glues. Our competitive advantage was that we could make lignin into spheres, that behaved really nicely. The curious thing was that no one had a good idea how the spheres formed, but it didn't seem to matter, because we we getting pretty good results regardless.
But during the lockdown I started doing thought experiments on the possible structures of lignin and came upon an idea that they are hollow tubes. I had plenty of other ideas, but one of the most important one of those was that our spheres would form by the stacking of the tubes into large ordered structures. More specifically I had the idea that the lignin tubes would be first rotating freely when dissolved in a solvent, but when water would be added, the rotation would stop and they would form an aggregate called a Waterman polyhedron. This would mean that lignin would form hexagons and squares made of hollow tubes.
It took me some time, but finally I managed to image these hexagons by electron microscopy. It took a bit of 'lab magic', because if done properly, our product would be a nice sphere. But if I intentionally stopped the process of self-assembly, I could see the structure. Well, I could see the hexagons, as you see below, but the squares had turned into those obelisk shapes.
Well, this was promising! The only problem was that the process required a mixture of water and solvents and I didn't have a good idea what the solvents did.
Well, I tell a lie. I had an idea, but the idea turned out to be wrong. You see, the solvent formed a uniform mixture with water and for a long time I thought that there were individual solvent molecules surrounded by water on all sides. But what my experiments showed that it seemed that the solvent molecules formed thin crusts around tiny cores of water. And not only that, but they seemed to be forming crusts of very specific sizes. What we scientists would call 'quantized'.
It took a long time until I figured out that the crusts weren't just something to do with solvents. It was early this year (2022) when I thought that perhaps the quantization applied to water as well. I began thinking of the possibility that what if liquid water was made of spheres. Then it hit me: quantum states are not an abstract phenomenon relating to individual molecules. Clusters of molecules are the quantum state!
You see, we chemists use optical spectroscopy to study the quantum states of matter. When we shine light through matter, some of that light gets absorbed. And the wavelengths are very specific to the matter being studied. For liquid water, the main absorptions are 2898 nm and 2766 nm. But no one thought these numbers had anything to do with physical objects!
But water doesn't just have this size. There are plenty of other sizes as well. In liquid water the number is smaller, but in water vapor, there are huge number of peaks.
I didn't focus on vapor at first, because I was more familiar with liquid water through my experiments. Next I thought that perhaps liquid water is primarily these spheres of just under three micrometers and that the rest of the peaks in the absorption spectrum are spheres between these larger sphere.
If this was so, then the volume of water would be determined by the large spheres and the density would be determined by all of the spheres. And if water were spheres and temperature was the movement of molecules, the spheres should be rotating. Then I thought that if spheres are rotating against each other, shouldn't there be friction? And if there's friction, there should be some signs of this.
And then it hit me: pH! Like most of us remember, water has a pH of 7, but that's not quite true. You see, pH is the negative logarithm of the proton concentration of water, and dependent of the temperature. This is getting a bit technical, but bear with me. This means that a teeny tiny bit of water is 'broken up' by its thermal motion. The problem is that the correlation isn't that good. However, I found tables for both pH of water at different temperatures and the density of water at different temperature. Then I calculated the proton concentration of water from the pH and matched the proton concentration next to the density for all of the temperatures I found data for, and I got the graph you see below.
If you look closely, you see of course that you can draw a straight line from the data points, and most importantly you can see a technical thing called an R² value. If this value is close to 1, the correlation is good. What I had was 0.9991, which was an excellent value!
This was a graph that no one had made, because no one thought that the two phenomena would be in any way related.
But this wasn't still enough. I didn't have an idea what would cause such a quantum state. Then I realized that perhaps the molecules are wound around a spherical core by some mechanism. I found a ball and some yarn and started winding the yarn around the ball, but realized that once I had gone around the ball, the two ends of yarn met on the same side. You couldn't tie the yarns together to prevent the yarn from unraveling. This was a problem for a while, until I understood that what you needed were two balls! If you made to identical balls with yarn twisted around them and then turned the ball first 180 degrees so the loose yarns faced each other and then turned them 180 degrees still facing each other, then the yarns could be tied together!
This sounds a bit complicated, but this is the magic of the supramolecular orbital. Two balls covered with a single piece of yarn tied to a loop. Next, I thought of describing it mathematically. Being a chemist, I really don't need very fancy mathematics. But in this case, a good grasp of high school mathematics was enough. And no calculus!
First of all, I drew a sketch of the idea with PowerPoint. The image looked nice, but I had no idea how describe it in solvable equations. You, see the different colored curves were projections in one plane, but the orbital was a three-dimensional object.
If the 'real' orbital was too difficult, perhaps I could still solve a simple orbital? The simplest shape I could imagine had two loops around a sphere. Or four loops alltogether for two spheres. It still looked intimidating, but I thought it solvable, even for me.
Then it was time for some algebra and trigonometry. And I lied just a bit. There was a dash of calculus. I had to do a bit of derivation, but I could check my calculations with Wolfram Alpha, so I didn't need to relearn things after twenty years, or even more of almost no maths..
It took a long time for me to figure the equations out. In the end it wasn't really about algebra or calculus. Once I realized that I needed projections in three planes: x-y, y-z and x-z, then the equation become very simple. But to be able to see the different projections, I didn't have the imagination, but I 'cheated'. You see I drew the rough shape based on the x-y projection, using the 3D software Blender, and I could let my computer do the 3D visualization for myself.
So now I had the solutions for the equations and a manipulable three-dimensional object. I even 3D printed the object so I could see how it looked like in real life.
But even after all of this, it wasn't enough. Do you know why? Because I had assumed that light is a physical ring caught by the supramolecular orbital. And that should not possible, because light is not a physical object. Or this is what we are told.
You see when Einstein discovered the quantized nature of light, he used the phrase:
"If every light energy quantum ionizes one molecule then the following relation must exist between the absorbed quantity of light L and the number j of thereby ionized gram molecules" and then wrote the 1905 version of the equation
In layman's terms it says that if molecules move freely, then a single quantum of light has an energy that is inversely proportional to its wavelength. This means that the bigger the wave is, the less energy it has.
This means that the 'bigness' of light could not be the same type of bigness as that of ordinary matter. As E = mc², then the wavelength λ would have to have been in the numerator (above the line) and not the denominator (below the line).
Again it took a long time to figure it out. The final nail to the coffin was to carefully read Einstein's paper and see where the problem was. You see, if the energy of the quantum of light is absorbed by the double sphere, with a diameter of λ, the surface area of the spheres is 2πλ². If a single molecule takes an area of A from the sphere, there are
molecules on their surface.
This means that despite the energy taken up by a single molecule (EP) takes up as much energy as Einstein calculated, the whole object takes up
While you wouldn't understand anything else of the calculation, you see that now λ is at the numerator. This means that light can have mass!
And almost as an afterthought, this means that molecules cannot move freely, even in gas. So this means that while all of the equations used to describe how the world works are just fine, what we understand the equations to mean has to change.
But this is just the beginning. Now I know where we were wrong, but there's so much to be done. I have quite a few ideas where things are headed, but I'll leave them for another blog post.
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