Slashdot Mirror
Transparent Concrete
rakerman writes: "The Economist reports in How to see through walls that development is underway on translucent concrete, with hopes of eventually developing transparent concrete. Can transparent aluminium be far behind?"
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Apparently neither The Economist nor Slashdot knows the difference between translucent and transparent. Ugh.
Anyway, this is old news. Metropolis magazine reported on the development of translucent concrete back in April 2001.
Such a material already exists--in fact it predates human civilization. It's called Al2O3, or alumina, and more commonly known as sapphire (or it's chromium-doped cousin, ruby). It has a hardness of 9 out of 10 on the Mohs scale (the only harder material I know of is diamond) and is transparent in the absence of impurities. However, it is not an alloy--it's a crystalline oxide.
Metallic aluminum cannot be transparent except in thin films; this will be explained in a reply to the top-level post in this thread.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Buildings glowing from within? This is terrible for astronomers... the added light pollution would further ruin the viewing conditions for many great observatories.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments yet, but after reading the article, the first thing that concerned me is that the nice thing about a concrete building is that it will hold together when it catches fire, not melt, puddle, and add to the blaze with choking poisonous smoke.
Hopefully the designer is taking into account other properties besides strength.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'