

Neutrons Become Cubes Inside Neutron Stars - terio
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27074/?p1=blogs

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Someone
I do not understand most of that paper, and probably never will, but can
someone explain why they propose cubes?

If I take a crate of tennis balls, and compress it, I expect the balls to
first (more or less) form a densest sphere packing, and from there, I expect
they will start to deform to look like truncated octahedrons
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitruncated_cubic_honeycomb>)

Those may be cubic, but it aren't cubes.

Also, since there is no unique densest sphere packing, it would not surprise
me if variations on this are possible
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing>).

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pavel_lishin
Random question for astrophysicists who might see this - what would neutronium
actually look like? As I understand it, color and reflection is all due to
interactions with an atom's electrons - and neutronium has none.

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inpoortaste
Makes me think of the rectangles from 2001 Space Odyssey

