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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."
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...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
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?
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."
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
"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.
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...