This seems more of inertia, Newton's first law. "An object at rest stays at rest,...". What comes to mind say there is some threshold acceleration (e.g. or at extreme, accelerate to c within some short time, t), then essentially you have a body at rest and breaks at the weakest point. Interesting would be seeing this effect with varying viscosity.
It's an amorphous solid last time I dove into this.
The "well it's technically a liquid!" because it "flows" is really not telling the whole story. Like most science, it's just more complex than can be quickly summarized with one sentence, and doesn't quite map to just high school simplifications.
Oobleck (corn starch and water) will do this too. But presumably they already knew that. The article describes it as being known to happen in “complex fluids,” but that it was news that it happens in “simple fluids.” Presumably silly putty and oobleck are “complex fluids?”
Someone tell me the industries that are going to benefit the most from this in the short and long term and what I can expect to see in the next 30 years as a result of this discovery.
It’s a new, generalizable material-science property at STP. Those almost always find practical uses.
(Off the top of my head, a material that dissipates tension below a certain rate but fails when it is applied faster than that rate seems to resemble a mechanical breaker. As in not an electrical breaker that works mechanically. But one that decouples when you pull on it super hard. Being able to do that in fluids means one can potentially do that at very tiny scales.
More broadly, if simple fluids have a quasi-elastic mode, that has fundamental implications for hydrodynamics. I'd be super curious to know, for example, if anything similar to this occurs in air or water.)
Maybe it will not have any mmediate application. But guess what? It's still cool! And that can be its very own reward if you let it.
Oh, btw: electricity was a novelty toy for several long decades with no major practical applications. But that eventually changed because people kept researching it. And it changed the world.
[edit: but glass is not a simple fluid.]
The "well it's technically a liquid!" because it "flows" is really not telling the whole story. Like most science, it's just more complex than can be quickly summarized with one sentence, and doesn't quite map to just high school simplifications.
What I said is true but not for glass. Pitch is a liquid even though it feels like a solid and shatters when smashed.
(Off the top of my head, a material that dissipates tension below a certain rate but fails when it is applied faster than that rate seems to resemble a mechanical breaker. As in not an electrical breaker that works mechanically. But one that decouples when you pull on it super hard. Being able to do that in fluids means one can potentially do that at very tiny scales.
More broadly, if simple fluids have a quasi-elastic mode, that has fundamental implications for hydrodynamics. I'd be super curious to know, for example, if anything similar to this occurs in air or water.)
Oh, btw: electricity was a novelty toy for several long decades with no major practical applications. But that eventually changed because people kept researching it. And it changed the world.