On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 06:18:32PM +1000, Rob O'Connor wrote:
> So strange matter can be formed by squashing nuclear matter beyond
> some critical limit - and industrially usable quantities can be
> produced?

Strange matter wasn't made by just squashing ordinary nuclear matter,
it was transmuted via some catalytic process with a great deal of
energy, typically in factories orbiting close to a star.

The nuclei were altered to include strange quarks in addition to the
usual up and down quarks.  In reality, the jury is out on whether such
matter would be stable.  Free baryons with strange quarks are not
stable - just as free neutrons are not stable.  Strong force
interactions and Pauli exclusion should make them much more stable
within a nucleus.

The resulting effect of strangelets keeping muons from decaying is
(almost certainly) fiction.  The collapsed state of such muonic matter
is not due to pressure, but just because the much more massive muons
'orbit' so much nearer to a nucleus than electrons do, and are bound
very much more tightly (this part is verified IRL).  If muons were
stable, they would bind to atoms in the same "shell" structures as
electrons, with the same sorts of chemical bonds only much closer and
stronger.

So if you could magically transmute all the electrons of a lump of
iron into muons (and keep them stable), almost all would be hundreds
of times further away from nuclei than their ground state distances.
The newly muonic iron would be an almost totally ionised plasma, in
other words.  They would very quickly radiate away their excess energy
in x-rays and form a gas of muonic atoms, which in turn would condense
to liquid and then cool to a solid.

In the liquid and solid state, they would be more than 200 times more
closely packed in each dimension than ordinary electronic atoms of
iron, and with much stronger chemical bonds.  Such muonic iron would
(to first approximation) melt at something like 40,000 K.

The part about wanting to use iron or nickel to make muonic atoms was
my idea.  The published material didn't take into account the effect
of the strong force in initiating fusion at the very close
internuclear distances of muonic matter.  Most lighter nuclei would
fuse very rapidly, and such close proximity would even catalyze decay
of heavier nuclei (though at a slower rate for such multibody
processes).

> Wow.  Is this an RPG setting, or described in a short story/novel?

It was from some sort of online collaborative fiction setting in the
late 90's.  There were thousands of pages of all sorts of details.  I
can't recall what it was called. I was involved for a short time in an
IRC-based roleplaying game based in a tiny part of that setting.

After going through the rest of the post and rewriting some of it, the
name of the online setting came back to me: Orion's Arm, and looks
like it is still going.  I slightly misremembered the date though: it
only started in 2000, and it appears to have changed significantly
since my experience with it.

- Tim