Could it be possible that the heating of a conductor causes an induced magnetic field? I'm curious about the experimental design, but I wonder if the heating of one plate would create a current(via the Seebeck effect) and magnetic field which induces current in the other plate.
Something that I've never found a satisfactory answer to when I've read about this method before has been the source for seed crystals. Where did the 'original' seed crystal come from in this process? I suppose once a new crystal with proper structure fabricated, you could use the newly created crystal as seed for further creations. Usually this was glanced over in my textbooks on silicon fab while in college.
> while investigating the crystallization rates of metal, Czochralski dipped his pen into molten tin instead of an inkwell. That caused a tin filament to form on the pen’s tip
And later, describes the process for silicon
> Once the silicon melted, he placed a small piece of polycrystalline material—a seed crystal
It seems then, that the seed crystal is not anything special. A typical piece of metal (such as a the pen tip) is made of up multiple single-crystal "grains" with non-crystalline "grain boundaries" between them; this is a polycrystalline material.
The question then is, why does only a single crystal form, rather than multiple crystal filaments oriented at different directions according to whichever grain contacted the starting point of the filament...
> The question then is, why does only a single crystal form, rather than multiple crystal filaments oriented at different directions according to whichever grain contacted the starting point of the filament...
The silicon wants to be in the lowest energy state and it does so by forming a face centered cubic crystal (diamond structure). The formation of crystals depends on the cooling rate. If matter cools to fast, it can't form a crystal structure.
If the start of crystallization is sufficiently difficult, growth begins with only one random grain and when the other grains start growing, a significant time later, they find themselves shut off by previous growth.
A fuzzball of patches and “good ideas at the time”. It’s like the first iteration of an app that never sees the light of day, as you finish, sit back, go “ah, an abomination”, and rewrite the thing properly with what you learned from the prototype.
I do this pretty much any time I’m doing something new - I have three revisions of a solar panel stand sat out on the lawn right now, each better than the last, as I needed to build the thing to see how it actually held up to forces as it’s easier and more accurate (ah, how do I fit a screwdriver in this gap to fasten this?) than doing an engineering simulation.
At the highest level, the conversation looks like:
The design engineer: "We know on paper how the product needs to function in terms of strength, weight, durability, etc"
The manufacturing engineer: "We've never made something like this before. I've got a couple ideas how we can bend/shape/form/machine/weld these materials into the shape, but I don't know how those bend/shape/form/machine/welding operations are going to affect the underlying physical properties of the material. I know on paper these operations should be OK, and we can inspect them as we go, but again we've never done them before, we most likely will overlook something or discovery something new, so let's try one of them and break it early before we get too far down a potentially bad path."
The test engineer: "Well it worked up until X point then failed, here's the data for you design engineer and you manufacturing engineer, better try something else".
Design engineer: "Shoot, what we thought we were manufacturing isn't actually what got manufactured. Hmmm, is it even possible to make the part we need? Or do we now need to redesign the part because it can't actually be made. Let's try another approach. And maybe it's smart to pursue a few of these in parallel to increase our overall chance of success"
Those 3 roles can be the same person or separate organizations of hundreds/thousands of people. Requirements documents, manufacturing/quality reports, test reports, inspection reports are the language of this technical interchange.
Essentially doing something for the first time, no one has built a steel structure of this size before, that will have to withstand the forces that this will be out through in normal operation.
The original list has a few I’d argue with
>95. Brooks's Law has exceptions
However, the Wikipedia article linked has a subsection of exactly that — exceptions.
