Greek 'anameixi' loosely means a mixture or a blending. The special states could be called 'anameixic', the property could be called 'anameixicity'.
Why am I trying to find a name for this? Otoh, why are so many physicists trying so hard to popularize their projects for the last 40 or 50 years? Oh .. I think I just answered my own question.
But magic is related to non-Cliffordness, not mixing.
Also, the term "magic" is pretty well used in quantum computing, it really doesn't need to be popularized. The concept is quite important already and would be talked about regardless of its name.
Calling something 'magic' is like an admission that you have no clue about what is going on. Seems to me, they do have some clue, namely that instead of codes with perfect isolation, there might be some advantage to studying ones that allow some blending. The resulting spaces may (or may not) lead to a better description of reality, but doing science means to peel back that mystery. So to go and promote this under the term 'magic' is disingenuous.
It sounds as if it's in the same vein that gave us "strange" and "charm" and "color" (in the strong force sense). There was a whimsical time in particle naming. I'd say it ended when they rejected "truth" and "beauty" in favor of "top" and "bottom".
They are not "promoting" the term magic. It is a well-known and commonly used term in quantum computing research. It is also pretty well understood as a concept (mathematically), even if it's not always easy to recognize in nature or easy to know when it needs to be used in algorithms.
If they had just raised the rate and left the service as it was, I'd only have been slightly annoyed at them. But to alter what I had, and then ask that same amount to put things back the way they were? That was a slap in the face.
Maybe it's the very molecules that the live cells were using, just doing their thing without the cells. Cells concentrate things by confining them in a small volume, but otoh, if you have damp particles, the thin water layer on the particles would be a kind of confining space, with the added advantage of surface area to exchange gases with.
This is addressed later in the article. They think there's probably some of that activity but don't think those molecules could last long enough to produce the observed effect.
This is great, if you have significant amounts of free oxygen to work with, which early earth evidently did not. Would be interesting to see if anaerobic metabolism could also occur without cellular confinement.
Biochemists have been doing just that for like 100 years. They'd take a bunch of yeast, grind the cells into a slurry releasing whatever is inside, separate the cell debris, and perform experiments measuring fermentation rate.
It can, that's the reason why UHT milk has a relatively short shelf lifespan and degrades despite being devoid of living microorganisms. The enzymes keep doing their work long after the cell membrane is gone.
Compared to other forms forms of liquid milk indeed, but it has a rather short shelf life compared to most sterile food. (Imagine if canned meat or fish had the same shelf life than UHT milk…)
Meat and fish subjected to the same processes as UHT milk (i.e., brief explosure to ultra-high temperatures) only lasts a few days, so UHT milk lasts way longer than the comparables.
CDs turned out to be terrible for long term storage, because the actual bits are pits in the very thin aluminum layer that's bonded to one side of the transparent polycarbonate disk. The back side of that aluminum often had nothing but a painted label to protect it.
DVD otoh, seems much more durable. The storage layer is sandwiched between two decent thicknesses of poly. But who knows, only time will tell.
I am continually amazed at the number of my nerdy colleagues who have never even heard of Pratchett, particularly when it's someone who's into D&D or otherwise enthusiastic about Tolken-esque works.
Imagine the dry humor of Hitchiker's Guide crossed with a generally Middle Earth setting, but with a good bit of contemporary (well, 90s/00-ish) cultural references mixed in, and multiply by the fact there are literally dozens of Discworld books, and it's incredible that finding another Pratchett fan is so rare.
Why am I trying to find a name for this? Otoh, why are so many physicists trying so hard to popularize their projects for the last 40 or 50 years? Oh .. I think I just answered my own question.
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