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Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film
buzzlightyear writes: "The Sept. 12 Chicago Tribune has an article headlined "Sparkling discovery for science" , about the development of ultrananocrystalline diamond film. The scientist who developed this, Dieter Gruen, started by experimenting with fragmented buckyballs, and had proven its properties in 1994, but he is only now receiving recognition and an award from the Materials Research Society. Preliminary tests show that ultrananodiamonds are 1,000 more wear-resistant than silicon, and 1 million times denser than conventional crystals. This makes them a practical base material for micromachines and other devices that had only been theoretically possible before. Maybe this will mark the real beginning of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age."
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"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If someone would develope a technique for cheap, easy to produce, single crystal films, then you'd have a huge break through.
and btw, socialogical is sociological, from socio- logia (latin)
oh, and Heinlin wrote non-perverted sci-fi? what about the sexual explots of Lazarus Long, who had sex with his mother as well as all of his sisters?
If I remember correctly, Stranger in a Strange Land was about 40% sex, 90% of which was out of marriage, 50% of which was between blood relatives.
Pretty exciting stuff, until you get halfway down the article and discover that they made it with buckyballs. Doen't eople realize that there is no large scale (ie greater than a few hundred molecule at a time) process for making these things, after more than 15 years! Sure they're amazing, but at thousands of dollars a milligram, there isn't much use. When we can either a) find a large scale production method for either fullerenes or nanotubes, or b) make a proper nanoassembler, that will be one thing. Until then, all this talk is even less meaning full than those 1950s Popular Mechanics articles that proclaimed flying cars for all within the decade...
/* This post not warrantied for mission critical applications. */
If what I heard is worth taking at face value, then I think the sad little info releases about 'recent' technological advances we see available for public consumption are the result of an orchestrated control over the time line on which the general public is kept in regard to scientific advancement. As far as I can figure, we're at LEAST thirty five years away from having access, (both physical and psychological), to the kind of tech a select few currently take for granted.
Kinda sucks.
One of the main applications in the instance of this fine crystaline stuff, (which was not even mentioned either in the article or on Slashdot), was in the area of battery architecture.
If any of this is true, then most of us here at Slashdot are playing in tune like a bunch of damned lemmings to a timed beat metered out by others. Feel the joy.
-Garund
"I'll see it when I believe it."
It's to use when fabricating little tiny gears and components. For actual physical work at very small scales.
After rereading the article's paragraph (several times), I'll agree that it is talking about the size of crystal produced, rather than density.... but saying "fits inside" is a rather confusing phrase when talking about things at the atomic level. (Whereas talking about suns or planets "fitting inside" is much more clear, to me at least.)
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
It must be that I haven't had enough caffeine today if I can't decide whether to moderate this up or down.
Off to get some joe, then... Need to wake up my sense of humour.
Still, for another example of Stephenson getting things frighteningly right, check out the Wired article on immense cargo airships. I have actually visited the company, and it looks for all the world that they know what they are doing (if the size of the hangar is anything to go by).
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
But did he hit any of the stars in London? They've always had good theater there. (Or would that be theatre?)
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Well from what I gather from other posters supposedly with nanites you can create almost anything you want. One of the reasons that the British wanted colonies was for the economics and raw materials. So in a society that can create anything at all what would be the use of irritating a large mass of people who would just wish you harm?
Respond to s
sorry, not Stranger in a Strange Land, but "To Sail Beyond the Sunset"
Stranger was the last one I read... kinda had it on the brain
--SpookComix
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
For grinding anything.
Fancy glitter material for expensive clothes and
houses?
New electronics substrate (Carbon has same valence
as Silicon).
I love Heinlein. His books changed my life. I idolize him. But you do seem somewhat deluded.
Early in his career he wrote very wholesome books - which were Juvenile Fiction (include Starship Troopers, which movie really depressed me) meaning they were written for kids. Which is great, especially considering the reading level is above most adult books these days. Maybe you only read his little kids books.
Later on he wrote fewer juvenile books, and more adult ones. (There is some cronological overlap between the categories. But the books are usually labeled.) These were not "wholesome" in any way. Juvenile or not was based largely on the applied themes.
I'd agree he had issues. Almost every adult contained orgies of some sort, usually with all the protagonists, and many contained various other "free thinking" sexual practices. I doubt he ever had anyone punished for incest. People who were abusive were likely to get punished, although his books were realistic enough that this didn't always happen.
But I love him. He was smart and experienced. He was dead-on about most people, imho. And he was honest about things. And I agree that he hit to the heart of a lot of people by being honest.
Another recommendation: The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, by Dr. A (Issac Asimov) I was very surpised when I read this book. I've since decided that good science fiction writers are smart and have few delusions, and that only delusions can keep you from being a sick bastard.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
The four books were: 2001, 2010, 2061, and 3001.
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
After rereading the article's paragraph (several times), I'll agree that it is talking about the size of crystal produced, rather than density.... but saying "fits inside" is a rather confusing phrase when talking about things at the atomic level. (Whereas talking about suns or planets "fitting inside" is much more clear, to me at least.)
However, I do wonder why you believe that having some quantity of carbon at a higher density than some other density would immediately change the effects of gravity on it... thus plumetting it through the planet.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
"Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film",
"Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film",
"Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film",
"Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film",
"Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film",
Whew!
My car has a truck engine in it (I have an '89 240SX, which has the KA24E motor. It's the same as the Nissan pickup from the same year) and it DOES get twice the mileage. Well, maybe not twice, but I pick up 30 mpg freeway. No joke.
You'd get a better increase in performance at a cheaper cost by just using buckyballs as lubricant.
Also, where do you think cars go when you get rid of them? Someone else buys them. If they're totalled, they get crushed, and recycled, and made into - Yep, you guessed it - cars, among other things.
If you're really worried about using this technology to improve your environment, figure out some way to use it to improve battery life, so we can all drive electrics. While you're at it, figure out a way to use it to make high-power photovoltaic cells...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
is Neal Stephenson so goddamn good at predicting things that happen to show up later on? (more or less, and stuff)
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Who's smoking what? There was actually more plantlife during various phases of the earth's lifetime. The most notable being shortly before the dinosaurs died out about 60 million years ago.
What is the time from prototype to production? I get the feeling this is like the first rocket made by Von Braun and we are waiting to go to the moon.
Listen, Sigmund, we'll discuss it in the morning.
Off-topic, but this reminded me of a great bumper-sticker I recently saw:
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
I thought it was a great breakthrough in technology, but my girlfriend didn't see it that way.
We must respect evil, and we must make evil respect us.
...and diamonds are the compressed carbon remains of....oh! that's just too creepy!
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
"Preliminary tests show that ultrananodiamonds are 1,000 more wear-resistant than silicon, and 1 million times denser than conventional crystals." The new material will immediately go into use as packaging for products such as cassette tapes, finally fulfilling science's dream of "the most irritating fuckin' thing to open of all time."
Hmm, Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film, huh? Does this remind anyone else of DiKote from ShadowRun?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
UNCLE
Ultra Nano CrystalLinE
(Cue theme from "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.")
(offtopic) I'm surprised they haven't done an "U.N.C.L.E." movie yet - what with MI:2 and so forth.... I guess, that with the Cold War over, the novelty of having a Russian and an American agent working together doesn't really mean that much anymore, though.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
MEMS, Microelectromechanical systems, could very well be a revolutionary technology with such applications ranging from tiny actuators for robots or satellites to small, efficient inductors in radio-frequency integrated circuits. While this article implies carbon-diamond MEMS could be revolutionary, it gives no indication they'd be practical.
Remember, silicon (and all semiconductors, including carbon) has a diamond structure, so presumably using these buckyball carbon diamonds would be better. The problem is, how would we fabricate them cheaply?
The key reason silicon micromachines dominate the market for things such as automobile airbag sensors is because they are able to leverage already highly advanced silicon fabrication technologies originally developed for integrated circuits. No such technology exists for pure carbon and developing one would cost an unbelieveably large amount of money and take many years. There had better be some compelling reason for us to do so.
Many times technologies "better" than silicon have come out only to remain niche technologies. A good example is III-V semiconductors such as Gallium Arsenide. While they are indispensible for lasers and such, they are not used for integrated circuits nearly as much as silicon, because they are so damn expensive. Their current main use, RF power amps and fiber-optic receivers, is quickly being impinged upon by advanced silicon CMOS technologies.
My point is that this discovery is pretty interesting, but it is far from "revolutionary". Until someone comes up with a killer app that provides a compelling reason to justify the expense to develop this further, I'm going to keep my money on silicon-based micromachines.
Hmm. Read the last paragraph.
IHBT. IHL. IWHAND.
in the book, windows are made of diamond. imagine anything that needs to be clear and hard being made of diamond! also diamond edged sharp stuff (besides drills ... like a microscopic diamond edged buzzsaw on a knife sized blade).
diamond imacs instead of lucite? ;)
(:christian:)
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
I don't know if he's gonna be thrilled with the '5 million dollars per set' pricetag, though...
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Somehow I think you (and severaly other posters) completely missed the point on the Neo-Victorian society. One of the common themes (if you can count two books) in Stephensons work is the idea that organized goverments will ultimately break down in the face of technology. In both Snow Crash and Diamond Age, the result is a large number of smaller goverments formed around some sort of shared ideal or commercial culture. In Diamond Age, it just so happens that one of the main groups in the book are a set of people organized around a shared ideal based on a Victorian society. This is not a prediction that nano technology will morph americans into neo Victorians, it is just an example of one possible group that may form in a world where large governments based on geographical borders no longer make sense.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Anyway the point is, we have the ability to create biological viruses with nanotechnology, and someone will do it. Perhaps the next war will not be in outer space, but in little microships zooming around in a human body.
-Water Paradox
information is immaterial
This ties in with the story done a day or two ago about the space elevator. Perhaps these nanodiamonds? could be used to coat some or all of the elevator to better protect it from the wear and tear of space. Just a suggestion. Does this mean that this material is stronger than a diamond?
But they would be killed by my nano-tech pet dragonfly or wasp. Better yet a minnie stealth or tomcat fighter plane shooting down all the bugs in my apartment or around me when I go outside in the summer.
"House, can you send the stealth bomber into my room - there's a mosquito in here."
[RODGER, WILCO......TARGET ACQUIRED....DESTROYED.....ANALYZING....99.98% CONFIDENCE TARGET WAS BIOLOGICAL....RETURNING TO BASE]
"Thanks house, lights out and G'night!"
..........FULL STOP.
With growth rates like 40% to 50%, and present market at %5-6 billion, the portland Portland/Eugene's silicon foundry industry may spawn mass-production machine tools taking in mechanical CAD drawings from the Internet and delivering you a box full of complex semicustom electromechanical devices for only a few thousand of dollars.
Porland/Eugene already has the highest growth rate in the world of any major high tech area.
Seastead this.
Stephenson's nano world wasn't a nice place where a boy and his nanite played in green fields and chased butterflies. It was a world crappier by far because of the destruction rendered by nanites so thick they filled the air, killed by chaning your blood chemistry, and shut down your nervous system in moments. I'm not saying this isn't a great discovery, but Stepenson's tale of caution should be used to highlight a darker potential...
It's not really about diamonds; the title simply refers to the age of mankind as 'the diamond age', as mankind can produce, at will, diamond materials effortlessly. These days, such a feat would be considered impossible. So.. diamond instead of glass. It basically is a reference to the mastery of nanotech.
Another interesting application of diamond films is their use in constructing gamma ray lasers.
It's hard to make such a device, based on the fact that there is not enough energy in an electronic transition to make gamma frequency emmisions. So, instead of electonic transitions, you rely on *nuclear* transitions. You have to pump the nucleus of an unstable isotope with x-rays to acheive population inversion inside the nucleus.
Anyways, you also have to imbed the radionucleide in a matrix, namely thin film diamond. I think the gamma ray laser project was one of the last SDI funded research projects in the 90's. I think they got the whole concept to work, but I'm not sure if it got developed further.
-->OBQT
Several posts have pointed out the foreshadowing of this technology in the fictional works of Stephenson and others.
While there are certain similarities, no one has yet mentioned the book Go At Secopholix by Donald Kunch.
Actually, I'm not too surprised. It was an utterly forgettable book. Where it not the only thing I had in the lab during a long summer internship, I would have never bothered with it. Kunch is respectable physicist but, quite frankly, a horrible story teller.
Nevertheless, this exact technology played a pivotal role in the storyline. Now that it is quickly becoming science fact instead of science fiction, I'm interested in re-reading the book. Perhaps old Don knew more than it seemed at the time.
I've checked FatBrain but can't find it. I'd hate to use Amazon.... Does anybody know somewhere else I might look?
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
ultrananodiamonds are 1,000 more wear-resistant than silicon, and 1 million times denser than conventional crystals.
A million times denser would give one cubic centimeter of the stuff a mass of several metric tons. What the article actually says is:
1 million crystals in Gruen's diamond film can fit inside the crystal produced by conventional methods
Which means that the crystals are a million times SMALLER, not denser.
D
when am I going to see my transmetta powered pda watch using this stuff.
Use this process to coat the rings and cylinder wall for my trucks engine. While there at it, coat everything that rubs or has water running through it. With its low coefficient of friction, and long wear, the engine will double in horsepower, get twice the mileage and practically never wear out (with proper maintenance).
The long life will mean that the most environmentally damaging the vehicles do in their lifespan (other than crushing small woodland critters), being made, will be done less often.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Actually a couple years ago, I was reading about somebody who wanted to coat the blades of various tools with some sort of vaccuum deposited diamond film (possibly this... I don't know too much about this process, the think i was reading also involved vaccuum chambers and heavy hydrogen and bombarding stuff with microwaves... didn't sound like too practical a process on an industrial scale).. That was in 93 or so, so it was probably something different... This sounds cool though =:-)
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Play Six Pack Man. I
Does anybody else hear that low T2 background music?...
...
At the turn of the century, experimental quantum computers had been successfully demonstrated in scientific labs
Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, writes an article warning against the potential dangers of ubiquitous nanotechnology
In the year 2000 Argonne National Laboratory researchers develop a process for growing diamond film that promises to bring the superior mechanical, tribological, and thermal properties of diamond to the rapidly expanding field of micro- electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology.
...
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Dum da dum
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
Dum-da-dum ta-dum
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Jules Verne predicted submarines and fax machines, among other things...
just my blog and pix
but diamond is also transparent, so I wander if it couldn't in some way for optical semiconducting. very exciting thought imho.
Called sarcasm, maybe you've heard of it?
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
...each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds
Uh... so a meter of dark matter would be how long exactly?
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
. . . like ultrananocrystalline, it's gotta be good!
appologies to Schmuckers.
Caffeine underflow (brain dumped)
If this film is transparent, wouldn't it be possible to use it as protective coating for teeth? If it's opaque, perhaps it could be used as a two-in-one cavity-stopper/teeth-whitener coating, assuming it could be artificially colored if it isn't naturally white.
Anyone have any ideas for applications of this?
-G. Waters
"sigs cause cancer"
********PRESS RELEASE***********
MicroMachines is proud to announce its most durable line of toy vehicles ever! Made of space-age Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Film, these little cars and trucks are virtually indestructible and now weigh as much as the full sized vehicle!
CAUTION: Do not drop Ultrananocrystalline MicroMachines on your little brother's head. Placing Ultrananocrystalline MicroMachines on railroad tracks may cause derailment and death.
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
they had those commercials where the dude would talk really fast. one of those made of diamond would be pretty sweet if you ask me.- -----
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There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
But did [von Braun's rockets] hit any of the stars in London? They've always had good theater there. (Or would that be theatre?)
Well, I've been told that the best way to analyze the distribution of rocket-bomb hits is to take a map of London and put a sticky star on the site of each hit, color coded for how you're feeling that day....
I don't know enough about the process to be certain, but the mechanics of the idea would work.
V
>Think about it.
:-p
Man, whatever you're smokin' today must be primo, eh?
You know, you have a point though. Before the advent of mass-produced internal combustion engines, there wasn't nearly as much plant life on the planet.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Neal Stephenson is one of the most brilliant writers I have had the pleasure of reading. The Diamond Age is becoming more and more possible as our technology advances. The advances in nanotechnology are leading towards being able to link different elements on the atomic level. If you haven't read any of Stephenson's books, go buy them now. Cryptonomicon is his latest and it deals with cryptography and crypto analysis. All of his work as proved very thought provoking for me. - Khaotix Brevis ipsa vita est sed malis fit longior - Publilus Syrus
Assuming that you are referring to the General who started out life in the book as a Japanese prisoner digging a place to toss a planetary mass of gold, his name is Wing, and he is quite definitely Chinese.
No, Heinlein had an imagination, unlike the current crop of anime-lovin' brain damaged "sci-fi" fans of today.
He took issue with Conservative America's prudism, and apparently irks people to this day. Not bad for a octagenarian Naval officer.
Don't worry, we can always sniff them out with dogs.
You probably didn't realize it, but wear and corrosion of automobile engines is one of the primary ways of adding iron (Fe) to the environment.
Everyone needs iron, hence the One a Day plus iron adds, but unless a plant is growing in iron rich soil, like the oolitiic hemattite in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, it may not get enough iron. For your garden, you could just use fertilized, but you can't fertilize an entire environment.
But when you drive, tiny iron fragments get scraped off your engine, out the exhaust pipe and into the atmostphere, provding iron to plants.
Think about it.
Ideas like this have been kicking around for years. The real problem isn't getting the carbon/diamond on the blade edge, it's keeping it there. Diamond is inert, so it doesn't like sticking to things, so it usually "rubs off" the substrate (metal, in your case) quickly.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
They already use carbon as an electronics substrate for cryogenic (VERY low temperature) electronics, 1 or 2 Kelvin type of stuff. Also, Silicon Carbide electronics are potentially useful for high power application. There is just no way , though, that Carbon will be used as a general-purpose substrate because:
1. THE MAIN REASON: Silicon has an EXCELLENT oxide (SiO2) that makes field-effect transistors possible. These devices are the basis of the modern computer (that is post 1980) revolution because they are much smaller and use less power than biploar transistors and have in fact made that current crop of microprosessors possible. Without a high-quality native oxide, you don't have a field-effect transistor, so you don't have a leading-edge microprocessor. That's why you don't see Gallium Arsenide microprocessor in the 40 GHz range, because Gallium Arsenide doesn't have a good oxide.
2. Electron mobility: Silicon is much faster than carbon.
3. Ease of fabrication: Silicon is pretty much a miracle material when it comes to fabrication. It is self repairing when annealing in the furnance, is cheap to produce, and very easy to generate in single crystal form.
There are more but Silicon is here to stay for a long, long, time.
Maybe now it will be possible to create quantum computers that are much more functional than the ones that currently exist.
Not really. The problem with quantum computers is that essentially the computer is designed for a specific problem, since the physical structure of the computer IS the program. A diamond crystal may contain more atoms (and therefore more Qbits) but this doesn't necessarily make a more powerful computer, just like a heap of 1 billion transistors is not automatically more powerful than a P3, or even a 286 for that matter. It all depends on how they're wired together.
I expect a really powerful quantum computer would look more like a dendrimer, but that's just my guess.
Does anyone else get envision a perfectly normal looking fly or perhaps a spider. With nano cameras.. and a nano wireless tcp/ip stack .. transmitting your life to ?
Would make for some cool voyeur www sites I spose.
His books suck!
They have little plot. Underutilize characters that he sets up as main characters, overutilizes background characters. Follows no coherent pattern in the storyline.
He may do his research, but I would wish to God (not Stephenson) that he would read the other God's book --Sol Stein's Stein on Writing. Maybe that would help him out.
--I could go on like the energizer bunny, but my battery died.
"Ultrananocrystalline" diamond films are deposited by a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method developed at Argonne and patterned by using photolithography and other techniques common in the semiconductor industry. The result is freestanding diamond structures as little as 300 nanometers (nm) thick with features as small as 100 nm and friction coefficients as low as 0.01.
CVD cheap?!? You must not know that much about semiconductor manufacturing.
if volume [decreases], density increases.
...if the mass is being held constant, which it obviously isn't. The crystals are smaller because they contain a million times fewer atoms, not because they contain the same number of atoms packed a million times tighter.
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The Chicago Tribune article was light on the tech details. Anybody got anything meatier? Online Papers? The patent numbers covering the process? The homepage of the lab he's working at, or that of the MRS?
I suppose I can get his patents by just knowing his name...I'll try that, and report back.
Shouldn't this have been posted by Hemos?
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E_NOSIG
I think the gamma ray laser project was one of the last SDI funded research projects in the 90's. I think they got the whole concept to work, but I'm not sure if it got developed further.
Sadly, I think those research projects were left uncompleted due to the disappearence of Dr. Robert Bruce Banner, a pioneer in the research of Gamma Rays. I wonder what became of him?
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
sorry but i still prefer crystal methamphetamine.
(just my personal opinion)
FUCK CAFEINE
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
...with advanced degrees in physics, chemistry, and hyperspace geometry. Froin-glaven!
In all seriousness, obvious when you know what regular diamond crystals are like because the increased density version would involve collapsing the electron shells, which is frowned upon among civilized chemists (only those boorish astrophysicists would dare such an offense against the proper state of matter).
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Never heard of it and I don't really see any significant use for diamonds in many things except for drills and rings what about titanium?
Respond to s
my last name truly IS HEINLEIN.
and i will say that i am one preverse SOB.
not only that, but my mother tells me that the surname HEINLEIN means chicken farmer or something. our family crest has a rooster on it. which further proves that i am nothing but a COCK. yeah, I know, BIG SURPRISE.
BTW: no relation to the famous HEINLEIN.
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
So, while its true that nanotechnology won't morph americans into Neo-Victorians, its quite possible that the societies that are organized around engineering on that scale may come espouse the beliefs originally known as Victorianism.
personally, i can't wait for corsets to come back into style
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
Technology isn't as esoteric as you can imagine. It is as esoteric as you can't imagine.
Dorf on Writing is MUCH MUCH better.
This sig is worse than my last.
1 million times denser than conventional crystals.
This is a mis-quote. What the article says is:
"And 1 million crystals in Gruen's diamond
film can fit inside the crystal produced by
conventional methods."
This states that the crystals are one millionth as massive, not that they have the same mass at a smaller size. This explains why the film material is so much smoother than previously manufactured materials: Smaller granularity.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
"I think we need a new name for it. Perhaps "buckysheet" would do."
How about "buck-naked?"
I'm a big fan of Neal Stephenson, but a bigger fan of Sir Arthur C Clarke. He should get some credit for predicting that we are entering (have entered?) a "Carbon Age". Diamond-based materials are going to be a minor material of the future, and will not be as important as the major advances in other carbon-based materials. We've already seen buckyballs and carbon-fiber... I don't think anybody will disagree that we're on the verge of some exciting times as far as Carbon is concerned...
1 million times denser than conventional crystals
You mean 1 million times smaller than conventional crystals They're actually less dense than real diamond!
However, substances such as this which are durable and hard on a very small scale are potentially useful in the creation of blades with monomolecular edges, which would be quite good at cutting things apart.
....each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
The Clarke reference is pretty good. In 3001, the last book of the four-part trilogy, major historic sites were coated in diamond to protect them from the harsh environment they happen to abide in.
In "Shadowrun", they talk about long, bladed weapons coated with nanodiamond coats to keep a painfully sharp blade sharp without honing stones etc.
I personally think that nanodiamond coats are the best way to reduce friction on spacecraft; the near-perfect surface thus created would probably be able to get closer to subphotonic speeds than anything else we've come up with to date.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
11*43+456^2
Nanosheet? Crystalpage? Hmmm... UNCDF?
to make a beowulf reference, which I just did.
Maybe now it will be possible to create quantum computers that are much more functional than the ones that currently exist.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
What a troll. Don't get me wrong, I love Heinlein, but if you read his later work (the Lazarus Long stuff especially), he gets a lot more perverted than just implied incest. Like a literal rendition (through time travel and paradoxes) of the comedy bluegrass ditty "I'm My Own Grandpaw".... I could go on, but I won't.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Go back and read the books again. Society in his book is split up into very different subcultures. I've heard him say in person (at a book reading) he doesn't think that people will be able to get together and act as one homogenous type of group.
http://www.techtransfer.a nl.gov/techtour/diamondmems.html
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
Heinlein chastised perverts? If I recall Stranger in a Strange Land and Glory Road correctly, Heinlein was quite perverse. Not to mention the one book where the guy's brain is put in his secretary's body. Heinlein had issues.
Listen, Sigmund, we'll discuss it in the morning.
Well I started thinking I might've gotten some Gibson mixed in there and it turns out 'The Difference Engine' was Gibson not Stephenson. Just thought they were the same because of the similar styles and the Victorian obsession those two seem to have. Oh well. My point about Stephenson's mysticism and 'The Difference Engine's suck still stands.
-Zane
This sig is worse than my last.
This is a process that is already occuring, in a modest way.
Not only have we seen numerous "subculture" groups, essentially choosing a common identity at variance with the larger society around them, we also have such phenomena as ethnic and religious sectarianism, which have become much more important over just the past few decades.
Another, more curious, version of this trend is the phenomenon of micronationalism. Micronationalism may seem freaky, but it does show the same general tendency to pick a "personal" path along with likeminded individuals.
- Ravn
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
Compared to other techniques for producing diamond, CVD is probably cheap.
Submarines as such had been predicted long before him, and I seem to recall Hunley was used operationally just a year after Verne published his first novel (which wasn't about submarines).
And unless I misremember, the first commercial fax service was disbanded in 1871 after six or seven years of operation (as it was uneconomical). Used pendulums to synchronise.
Damn you man, don't you see the potential.
These new crystaline nano-ma-jiggers can be used to create cryastaline shields. Perfect for our defense against the oncoming krull invasion force the Slashdot crew have been o so informative about.
Anyhow, I am sure Nate and Hemos have been well into the development of the new shield technology.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Um, actually, I believe Heinlein wrote a novel called _The Sixth Collumn_ where the scary Chinese invade America (of course we defeat them with technology disguised as religion)...
My new catch phrase is: "I NEED A NEW CATCH PHRASE, BABY!"
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Maybe
this will mark the real beginning of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age."
Well, maybe yes and maybe no. We have to wait until next year for the 2001: A Space Oddessy prediction to come true, then in 2010 Jupiter explodes and becomes a star.
But wait, don't get too confused, at the end of 2033(isn't that the last of the trilogy?) we discover that DeBeers has been keeping all of the diamond matter a big secret.
Anyway, we have to wait until we have enough diamond to build all the stuff Clark wrote about first and then Stephenson piled on.
Visit DC2600
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
That was quite a nice post until the last paragraph when you made it clear that you were a tr0ll.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
What was wrong with good old die-cast metal?
Besides, I don't really see how some useless upgrade to miniature cars actually affects science. After all, all Micro Machines are nowadays are a crappy standover of the 80's, somehow still alive today... though I'm glad we don't have to listen to that dude in the Micro Machines commercials talk at 300 kilometres per hour anymore...
The Micro Machines Nintendo game was pretty fun, though... I enjoyed racing around on a pool table.
Ah well.
-Vorro
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A wise man speaks because he has something to say.
A foolish man speaks because he has to say something.
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What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
"Make me one with everything."
11*43+456^2
A science fiction book by Neil Stephenson about nano-tech and it's affect on society.
He apparently believes with nano-tech, America would turn into a Neo-Victorian British-aping society who would proceed to economocially subjugate China.
Sounds like Mr. Stephenson watched a few too many Merchant-Ivory films.