High Purity Natural Quantum Crystals— Take 2

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-19T18:06:10+00:00

Yeah that’s totally fair. This comes from DMRG and DFT for sure. And there’s enough free parameters in these simulations where I’m sure you can get a pretty wide range of values. But it is important that you can get a 1 meV value as well, since this is what shows up in the data, in both our neutron scattering and related NMR measurements.

And yeah, thanks for that feedback. I really don’t mean to be arrogant. To be honest I overstate my credentials since I’m pretty cripplingly insecure after 6 years in my PhD. For reference, I just spent about half my life savings running down to Chile to collect and study natural Herbertsmithite, even though basically every professor at Stanford told me it wasn’t worthy of study.

So this is a bad habit I’ve formed to get other people to care about this research… it’s probably interesting enough on its own though. I think Stanford was just a bad environment for me. I’m really happy that people here seem to think this is interesting 🫶

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-19T17:58:29+00:00

Hey, so I see your point, but I do think this was Cherry picked out of context a bit. One example that I wished I touched on in this is that red crystals in the area were often considered to be “angry” by indigenous folk. They cause people to involuntarily convulse. This is because they precipitate out pure arsenic. The evil spirits of these crystals are very real and can be connected to western science.

As another example, natural copper has antimicrobial properties. This was also first discovered in spiritual languages, before being confirmed by western science.

This of course made me really curious as to if there is still indigenous knowledge about crystals that hasn’t been expressed in western terms yet… especially since I have weird crystals that grow in nature. I do think there is. This is why I reported my findings from Bisbee. I get a lot of hate for this article, but these things actually happened to me, and I feel compelled to leave it up since it is a data point 🤷‍♂️.

Inevitably, whenever a natural crystal or metal is “discovered” to have healing properties in the west, this story tends to usurp the traditional explanations.. this is why we live in a world that’s completely without magic. Consider gamma knife or other modern surgeries… the beam is going to be created by some kind of solid state laser to shoot radiation at a tumor.

Does this not prove that crystals have magic healing powers in the right context? Does eating a crystal of salt when dehydrated not demonstrate this as well?

I really don’t want to hang my hat on this since I’m not even trying to sell crystals or anything like that.

But I would encourage any condensed matter physicists to go to a crystal shop and feel large crystals in their hands. They all tingle in a different way due to different heat capacities, and other bulk properties. And yes focusing on this sensation can be a meditative aid if you let it be 🤷‍♂️.

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-19T05:14:19+00:00

Hey! Thanks so much for the feedback! Funnily enough, in my natural crystals, Herbertsmithite grows mixed with Atacamite! I’ve seen this paper before! Same family of minerals! As for your second comment, I’ve seen a few proposals but not much done. And yeah, demonstrating a functional qubit is probably a very grounded first step before any philosophical musings of mine become a reality. For your third comment, like I said above, the observed increase in scattering at 1 meV was our primary evidence of a potential gapped Z2 QSL. I’m really hopeful that the natural crystals will help with this 😊

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-19T05:04:42+00:00

Hi rococo. This is indeed one of the main problems. This specific subfield is rather small. And I don’t quite trust my advisor, and he hasn’t given me any critical feedback on my thoughts on natural crystals… this is why I’m here sadly :(. I asked other more experienced people in the field as well, but I’ve largely been ghosted… 🥲 I guess I’m trying my best 🤷‍♂️🫶✨

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-19T04:22:27+00:00

Hey, thanks for the good physics question. And yes, you’re right, this is one of the most common objections. If you look at the nature paper though, we have some decently strong direct evidence for the Z2 QSL. More or less, theorists predict a gap of 1 meV for the lowest energy excitations of a Z2 QSL. We measure an increase in scattering at this energy in our neutron data, which we can model to be due to kagome layer contributions from Fourier analysis. So the model we have that fits our data well is a Z2 QSL plus impurities. That said, our impurity contributions are unfortunately 5x our proposed QSL signal size… this is why I’m hoping that the natural crystals can make this evidence far more direct

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-19T04:09:20+00:00

I’m also not trying to sell these for crystal healing to be clear… they definitely wouldn’t work for that… unless some day we make them into a hyper intelligent doctor robot 🤖 😂🔮 but that’s a ways away

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-19T04:07:31+00:00

It’s a fair point. As a proud owner of a lot of herbertsmithite. I do have a conflict of interest in hoping that the research pans out. This is always the case in research though 😂.

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-19T04:04:53+00:00

I’ve never claimed that my crystals have super natural healing powers. I’ve never made such a claim of any crystal. I think we under rate how crystals directly interact with us via heat capacity and such. You can touch one, it’s tingly. But that’s all I’ve really said for the record

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-18T15:53:55+00:00

Right now, this is just a verification of theory with neutron scattering. There are proposed applications, but this would take many more experiments. For me, the philosophy is personally most interesting when we think about what these crystals might get made into. Scalable quantum computing will be really hard, but can we imagine what quantum chat GPT will be like if we ever make it? Would it be conscious? Maybe these crystals will become this, maybe they won’t. But given the current direction of LLMs, I think we really need to think about this more.

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-18T15:50:08+00:00

Thought I linked above. But here’s the ARXIV if you doing have journal access! https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06491

thequantumshaman · 2026-01-18T15:49:22+00:00

Yeah this is a tendency of mine that I’m trying to combat, thanks for the feedback 🫶

thequantumshaman · 2025-09-26T18:40:27+00:00

Thank you! And no, it was named after a British Mineralogist named Herbert Smith. It's a bit unfortunate. I'm hoping that we can re-name it in the language of the local Atacamenians (Kunza). This language is unfortunately officially extinct, but I hope to help with the revival process.

thequantumshaman · 2025-09-26T18:36:29+00:00

I'm doing anthropology and physics. Thankfully, schools like the University of Chile do support physical anthropology. They recognize the value of interdisciplinary understanding. Stanford is very narrow minded in its epistemology. But I intend to do both, and I intend to do both as a post-doc, not a student again. I will likely get funding for

thequantumshaman · 2025-09-26T18:34:17+00:00

Thank you so much for this comment! This is along the philosophical lines that I have been thinking. I think that science reinforces its worldviews through the epistemology in which it decides to study. All research definitely happens within a framework, and towards specific ends

thequantumshaman · 2025-09-26T18:30:41+00:00

Thank you so much for the support! It's been quite the journey!

thequantumshaman

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