Transparent Aluminum Is Here

Alien54 writes "Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. (link includes a picture of samples) Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a "flame-spray" technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties. The method avoids many of the problems encountered in conventional glass forming and could, say the team, be extended to other oxides (see also: A Rosenflanz et al. 2004 Nature 430 761). Scotty would be pleased."

Comments

Future echoes

[Space cowboy]

I am beginning to suspect that the whole idea of sci-fi is in fact a future society time-travelling back every now and then to make a new 'Star Trek' film to nudge society onto a slightly different path :-)

The number of Star-Trek-driven ideas that have become reality is astounding -

• phasers. We have wireless tasers that use a laser to ionise the air then an electric current jumps towards the victim from a battery. The battery is currently an issue)
  
• communicators - hell mobile phones are far better than communicators
  
• voice recognition - lots available these days
  
• transporters - well we've done with an entangled photon. One down, seventeen quadrillion to go. Hey, it's a start!
  
• now, transparent aluminium.. someone's having a laugh!
  

Ok, we're missing the big one, warp drive, but apparently we have to have a war that more or less wipes out humanity first, so I'll be happy to give it a miss in my lifetime...

Oh yeah, FOR [insert deity]'s SAKE, STOP THE WHALING!!!

Simon

Re:Future echoes

[dave1791]

"Ok, we're missing the big one, warp drive,"

OK, I am not sure how Star Trek warp drives are supposed to work, but I remember a RPC circa 1990 called Traveller 2300 had something called "stutterwarp". The idea was this, take a starship and do the transporter trick to jump a few meters, or a couple of kilometers. Now do this at a few Mhz and you have near lightspeed with very little velocity.

Re:Future echoes

[clifyt]

"actually, communicators are more like radio communication ... you don't dial any number ..."

Why more like radio?

My email is smart enough that if I start typing the first 2 or 3 letters of an email, it can guess at who I want to send it to and be accurate most of the time. I don't need to know the email addresses of anyone involved these days unless I don't have them in my address book which is sync'd between my phone, 2 PCs and 3 Macs. All work about the same.

So you don't dial a number, but you do say "Sulu, Can We Get A Fix On..." and the internal processing realizes that since he didn't refer to a specific Sulu, he must mean the default one and routes it appropriately.

My Cell is smart enough that if I hold a button on the side and say the name it can dial about a dozen numbers. Battery life and processing speeds preclude it from listening all the time.

So, are you saying that because our technology isn't very sufficient today, theirs too must be as unadvanced. I've seen attainable advancements in 10 years that make 20 years ago look like the stone ages. In another 10 years, maybe we will just speak into a phone, and it will wait until it figures out who we are talking too and route accordingly. Who knows. Maybe we will all be back to fighting wars with sticks and stones.

glassish properties

[basics]

As glass itself is technically not a solid but a slow-moving liquid would glass not made from silica have the same general properites as "normal" glass?

I generally think of glass as being very inert for example. Anyone know if this would be the case if the glass was composed of differant substances?

(chemistry maybe?)

science inspiring sci-fi inspiring science...

[Ubergrendle]

One of the great things about sci-fi as a thematic backdrop (be it literature or movies/tv) is that it alone of all the genres has the possibility of inspiring a tangible effect upon the real world.

I remember an interview with James Doohan where he said his greatest pride that came from his career was that he inspired other people to pursue careers where they could make a difference to the world. How many engineers became engineers or went into sciences because of Star Trek?

I'm familiar with the Arthur C Clarke suggesting satellites; I doubt a similar cause/effect with Star Trek IV happened here. However, the similarities are cool, and at least with this genre there is the POSSIBILITY of changing the world for the better.

PS Fortunately such transitions from sci-fi fantasy to real world are few and far between. 90%+ of tv SF and pulp SF is dreck, and I myself and not looking forward to a Brave New World...

Re:woohho

[GoodNicsTken]

You make that joke, but I started thinking about my reef tank as soon as I read this article. When you go over 36" tall you have to use 5/8-3/4 inch low iron (so your fish and corals are not green) glass. If this is really that much stronger, larget tanks could be made cheaper, becuase the glass could be thinner. I wonder what the optical and strength properties really are? Anyone have more information on the testing?

Re:Scotty would be pleased.

[Mick Ohrberg]

Just goes to show how many ideas mentioned in StarTrek actually come about. I guess we still have to work on that warp drive, dilithium crystal regeneration and photon torpedoes...and replicators. "Earl Gray. Hot."

Re:Communicator

[jaredmauch]

I can't remember where i read about it, but it must've been here.. there are actually IP Phones made by one company that are wearable. Their primary market is hospitals. Ah yes, a quick google found me the product link.

Re:well then there are rubies and stuff

[Vacuum Sux]

Certainly. Sapphire is a crystal form of aluminum oxide and it is quite transparent. For example it doesn't absorb ultraviolet photons close to the visible spectrum which make it a suitable material to have in the windows to my vacuum chamber when I want to shoot UV laser light in to it.

Colorful

[einhverfr]

After all sapphires are basically alluminum oxide too....

Are these windows amorphous like glass or crystaline like sapphires? (Assuming amorphous, but not sure).

"transparent concrete"

[peter303]

I read some comprehensive article on "transparent concrete", probably the NY Times Sunday Magazine, but cant locate the reference. There are several related articles on Google. Concrete is seeing a resurgence as a decorative material, i.e. wall and floor coverings. Theres many ways to modify it to have more attractive decorative properties if you willing to sacrifice some structural strength. Concrete is inexpensive and easy to manipulate.

A more accurate term is translucent concrete. One guy embeds perpendicular optical fibers so some external sunlight gets through. There are other techniques too.

Re:You are such a geek...

[KlomDark]

Even weirder, back in the early 1900's, a man named Harold Warp (Now somewhat famous for starting a huge museum called Pioneer Village in the middle of Nebraska) invented a way of heat bending of plastic glass (Called Flex-O-Glass. The more commonly known 'Plexiglass' is a copy by a later competitor once the patent expired.) that retained its optical properties. This process became known as "Warping". At about the same time, mathmaticians were stumbling across the basics of the time-space continuum, and borrowed the term to refer to bending time/space.

The main street in Minden, Nebraska has now been renamed from "Brown Avenue" to "Harold Warp Memorial Drive" (Which most people refer to now as "Warp Drive"). A friend of mine lives on Warp Drive, which is kinda cool to a geek like me.

So they did the original creator of "Warping" a disservice when they wanted to obtain Plexiglass instead of Flex-O-Glass.

(Yah, I went to high school in Minden... :) )

Re:Submitter - Not Silly

[Rich0]

I remember seeing a demonstration on conductive polymers, and I immediately took notice of the fact that they had a metallic sheen to them. The same properties that lead to conduction also lead to the reflective properties of metal.

If you just want something transparent that is very durable, you can use something like this alumina technology, or even something crazy like panes of diamond glass or something like that (I'm not sure how strong diamond glass would be, but I'm guessing pretty strong).

On the other hand, a true transparent metal would have lots of desirable properties that none of these materials have. Metals are malleable and ductile, conduct heat well, can withstand stress by deforming, and conduct electricity. All of these properties have to do with the metallic bonds between metal atoms, and consequently they are incompatible with being transparent. That isn't to say that you can't make a nonmetallic material that can transfer heat, or which can bend - but it wouldn't be by the same mechamism as how a metal works.

I always loved metallic bonds simply because they are such an elegant demonstration of how a microscopic property such as chemical bonding leads to macroscopic properties like conductivity and malleability.

For those who want to know more, almost any general chemistry textbook will have a short section on metallic bonding which describes how they work and why they lead to these properties.

Re:Scotty would be pleased.

[Jorkapp]

Oh, a keyboard, how quaint.
We solved this problem with voice recognition software some years ago. The trouble is, we can't tell if the person is addressing the computer, or is simply talking about a computer. For example:

"Computer run a level 3 diagnostic on the transporter assembly" ...would trigger the computer to run a level 3 diagnostic on the transporter assembly.

or

"Damn machines, I did not tell my computer to self destruct." ...would trigger the computer to initiate the self-destruct mechanism. Kaboom.

Hopefully this problem will be fixed before Zefram Cochrane takes off in a few years.