Star Trek is HERE!

http://www.sci-fighter.com/news/newsfeb02/feb21aluminium.php3

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/0,1518,183008,00.html

Which might mean we have a long wait for commercial implications

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Yawn, Boring

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Originally posted by joliet_jane:
Whoa! Maybe I'll one day see inside my can of Diet Mountain Dew!

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I have seen the contents of Diet Mt. Dew, it ain't pretty. Now regular Mt. Dew I could live with ...........Z

This isn't transparent "Aloomi-num" (sorry Mr Doohan, you had a total failure of Scottish accent there).

This is transparent (or perhaps more accurately translucent) Alumina.

In terms of the words and letters it's not much different. In terms of gross bulk chemical analysis it's not much different, just a couple of Oxygen atoms added... But trust me, as a materials scientist I can assure you that Alumina is very, very different from Aluminium.

Alumina is Aluminium Oxide, Al2O3. This is a ceramic with all the brittleness that being a ceramic implies. Aluminium is a metal, it is quite tough and ductile.

Ceramics are covalently bonded substances, relatively simple molecules in which outer shell electrons are shared equitably between a small and definitely finite number of atoms (atoms of two or more elements).

Metals have their outer electrons shared between a great many identical atoms. It's one of the things that defines a material's metallicness (or non-metallicness). This "electron sea" intereferes with the passage of light, such that a transparent metal is about as likely as a pregnant male. The electrons in a ceramic don't neccessarily interfere with the passage of light (compare Silica, AKA glass, and other ceramics), but transparency is fundamentally incompatible with one of the defining characteristics of a metal.

A transparent Alumina is quite an achievement, and undoubtedly useful, but it is most definitely not the transparent metal predicted by Star Trek. My guess is that such a thing will not be seen in my lifetime, if ever. My guess is that this transparent Alumina has been achieved by an exceptionally fine grain size in the starting powder, like grains of a size similar to the wavelength of light. Such a capability would open up the fascinating possibility of making other ceramics transparent. However these would all be ceramics. They would not be metals and would not behave like metals.

Iain

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Originally posted by macadddikt18:
I can see Steve putting this to use in a mac in the future.
Nayt

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I wonder if Paramount is going to sue for trademark infringement?

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Originally posted by macadddikt18:
how cool would that be, a bullet proof mac. I can see it now.

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the original (clam-shaped) iBook was bulletproof.

... well the case could stop a bullet, anyway; I'm sure a lot of the circuitry would be broken

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Originally posted by MrMachineCode:
Okay, so if I understand this correctly, the reason you can't have a transparent metal is that the properties of the electron cloud in a metal make it so that the metal can't conduct light, and any changes to it's chemical composition that would allow it to conduct light would cause it to cease to be a true metal.

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But does the change have to only be in the chemical composition--can you change something else, instead? What if you cause the metal's electrons to be in some peculiar electrical or quantum state, similar but not necessarily the same as causing the material to lase?

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That is the kind of thing that would be required, and getting a bunch of electrons to co-operate is pretty tough, seeing as how the uncertainty principle says you can only know either where the electron is OR how fast it is going, not both. Destined to remain science fiction for some time...

Second, I'm curious. How is it that you pop into the forums at the exact time there is a subject you're an expert on? Is this just coincidence, or had you been a lurker for a while? Actually, what I'm really interested in is how long people lurk before starting to post. Do they just find the place and start posting, or do we have a large contingent of lurkers who don't have anything to say (or just don't want to say it)? But let's take answers in a new thread on lurking.

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babblefish? besides something from a Hitch Hikers guide to the galaxy what it is?

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