Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey everybody, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says we are
Speaker 1: living in a material world. I'm Joe McCormick, I'm Lauren Volgabon,
Speaker 1: and our host Jonathan Strickland is outsick today because modern
Speaker 1: medicine isn't that good yet. Oh We're we're working on it. Um.
Speaker 1: I was just kidding. It's pretty good, getting better every
Speaker 1: day we do, according to Dr you know McCoy from
Speaker 1: Star Trek. We're we're all we're all pretty silly right now.
Speaker 1: But yeah, well so he is out and we hope
Speaker 1: he's feeling better soon. But we're going to take you
Speaker 1: on a little brain journey with the two of us.
Speaker 1: And today we wanted to talk about following up with
Speaker 1: a recent video that Jonathan recorded about indestructible materials, right
Speaker 1: because because this whole Thoor film series has come out,
Speaker 1: and so we were thinking a lot about Uru, the
Speaker 1: mystical material that Thor's hammer is made out of, which
Speaker 1: is completely indestructible. I don't know how much you can
Speaker 1: really think about Uru, but I get what you're saying
Speaker 1: I don't know. I've known some nerds that would probably
Speaker 1: disagree with you, um, that have thought long and hard.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, so so what I got there? Hard?
Speaker 1: Oh I didn't even mean to pun. This is going
Speaker 1: to be I'm sorry, guys. I apologize accidental puns or
Speaker 1: even worse than ones on purpose. Okay, Well, what's the concept.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a hammer that's like super hard. You
Speaker 1: can't miss smash a lot of stuff with it without
Speaker 1: making it smash. Yeah, which which material scientists are actually
Speaker 1: working on? I mean maybe not in the thor hammer
Speaker 1: applications specifically that I'm personally aware of. If if this
Speaker 1: research is being done, it's not being reported to me personally. Um.
Speaker 1: But but but I mean, but that would be pretty cool, right,
Speaker 1: having having material that that you can do a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff too and it doesn't get hurt. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: So if we're on a search for an indestructible material,
Speaker 1: I want to think about for a second, like what
Speaker 1: that would really mean, because in one sense, you can't
Speaker 1: really have an indestructible material because material is made of atoms, right,
Speaker 1: and we know that even atoms themselves can be destroyed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: atoms can be destroyed as in converted into energy in
Speaker 1: a nuclear reaction. Right, That's what you do when you
Speaker 1: split an atom to create break the protons of the
Speaker 1: nucleus apart from from the electrons in a you know,
Speaker 1: if if if you're really trying hard, but that's difficult
Speaker 1: a splitting the atom. Yeah. So I think what we
Speaker 1: mean when we're talking about indestructible materials is a a
Speaker 1: material structure on a scale that's meaningful to us that
Speaker 1: doesn't I'm gonna use an Internet word here, that doesn't
Speaker 1: fail structurally. So it's a it's it would never make
Speaker 1: it onto the chemistry fail blog. Okay, yeah, I know
Speaker 1: that makes sense. In terms of material science. When you're
Speaker 1: talking about a a fail proof material, you can you
Speaker 1: can talk about kind of three different categories. It's it's hardness,
Speaker 1: which is going to be it's its resistance um to
Speaker 1: to localized deformation a k A like scratching um. If
Speaker 1: if you can poke it, scratch it, a braise it,
Speaker 1: dent it um, then it's hardness is poor all right. Um.
Speaker 1: Then you've got strength, which is the ability of a
Speaker 1: material to withstand applied stress without fracture um without breaking right. So,
Speaker 1: so within this category you've got like um tent sile strength,
Speaker 1: which is pulling, and compressive strength, which is pushing. So
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here is is yeah, like like
Speaker 1: tearing or ripping or smooching on the other end of it. Okay,
Speaker 1: you're not talking about being deformed, but about coming apart, right, right. So,
Speaker 1: for for example, if you're talking about something really strong,
Speaker 1: it would be um like like ceramics or metals, and
Speaker 1: something really weak on on that scale would be something
Speaker 1: like would oh okay that you know that that you
Speaker 1: can can't you know ceramic You're not going to pull
Speaker 1: on it and you're not going to shred it, but right,
Speaker 1: And then that last category is going to be toughness,
Speaker 1: which is um the the amount of energy and material
Speaker 1: can absorb before it cracks or breaks or otherwise permanently deforms.
Speaker 1: And that's how brittle an object is. So so going
Speaker 1: back to like ceramics, ceramics are very strong but also
Speaker 1: very brittle. Uh if you if you slack a hammer
Speaker 1: at them, whether it's made of ub or not, it's
Speaker 1: probably going to shatter into a billion pieces. Okay, So
Speaker 1: it's not like rubber, right right, rubber is is also
Speaker 1: very tough, but um, but not hard at all. It's
Speaker 1: soft you can poke it and leave a dent and
Speaker 1: uh and not extremely strong. At a certain point it'll
Speaker 1: bust apart. Okay, So that's interesting. So we want to
Speaker 1: talk about materials that are resilient in these different ways. Um,
Speaker 1: But first of all, like do we really need this?
Speaker 1: Like what would you actually use a material that's all
Speaker 1: that hard for besides just a hammer? I mean, I
Speaker 1: understand weapons and armor, but do we always have to
Speaker 1: be so violent? Like can we use these in a
Speaker 1: way that's that's nice. Well, going along with with armor,
Speaker 1: I guess you could use it for stain resistant clothing
Speaker 1: or stain proof clothing that's non violent and pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Actually, well lots of violence isn't caused by people, right,
Speaker 1: So there's the violence that say an airplane with stands
Speaker 1: when it's flying high speed against wind resistance. You could,
Speaker 1: I guess build stronger airplane parts to like withstand all
Speaker 1: that tension and what would you call it shaking? Yes, yeah?
Speaker 1: Or um or or engine parts even if if you
Speaker 1: if you make the plane engine out of parts that
Speaker 1: are extremely strong, then you know, not having some some
Speaker 1: part of an engine fail would be pretty good. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: you could think about I guess load bearing features too,
Speaker 1: for building bridges and buildings and stuff like that. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I if fewer bridge fail years over over the test
Speaker 1: of time would be great. Yeah. Actually, a YouTube comment
Speaker 1: or left a really cool comment on Jonathan's video, and
Speaker 1: we we generally do have awesome YouTube commenters. But I'm
Speaker 1: still personally a little bit just pleasantly shocked whenever someone
Speaker 1: says something nice and not terrible YouTube. So so good
Speaker 1: for good for you in particular, but but for thinking
Speaker 1: viewers in general. Yeah, yeah, we love our people YouTube broadly.
Speaker 1: You might be surprised if something nice happens. But yeah.
Speaker 1: A commenter called the simulationist a little shout out there
Speaker 1: on the video left a great suggestion. They said, what
Speaker 1: about a sun probe? And I thought, oh wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: by that, I assumed this person meant a solar probe, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you're going to shoot into the body of
Speaker 1: the Sun and send information back. Um, so that could
Speaker 1: be really interesting. Now, that would be a certain specific
Speaker 1: type of material resilience. It would need to survive super
Speaker 1: high temperatures and gravity core, So I do want to
Speaker 1: raise a question there. If we sent a probe straight
Speaker 1: into the Sun, and that probe were built out of
Speaker 1: some kind of magic material that meant it weren't destroyed,
Speaker 1: I wonder if it would be able to transmit information
Speaker 1: back to US UM because the Sun provides a lot
Speaker 1: of radiation interference. Like even when you have a satellite
Speaker 1: that's crossing across the sky, if when it's in transit
Speaker 1: across the Sun, meaning you know, the Sun is right
Speaker 1: behind it, we often have satellite outages because of the
Speaker 1: interference caused by the Sun's radiation. So if something were
Speaker 1: like going all the way into the Sun, I would
Speaker 1: think that level of interference would be so strong it
Speaker 1: would be hard to get any information back from it
Speaker 1: at all. But sure, also I'm wondering, I'm wondering if
Speaker 1: you could um broadcast out from inside a material that's indestructible.
Speaker 1: That sounds like maybe you would run into problems. I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe, but still it's a cool idea, and
Speaker 1: I like the way the person that Yeah, but let's
Speaker 1: talk about some super strong or super hard or super
Speaker 1: tough materials. What's out there, what's the best we got
Speaker 1: Diamonds diamonds. Yeah, you always hear that, right, Diamonds they're
Speaker 1: the strongest material, um, are they are? They not? Diamonds
Speaker 1: are hard, meaning they they resist they have strong resistance
Speaker 1: to indentation like we're talking about, so it's hard to
Speaker 1: like scratch them. And so this is true that they're
Speaker 1: very strong. I think for a long time people thought
Speaker 1: they were the strongest material. Uh, turns out they're not.
Speaker 1: Actually they're not even the hardest naturally occurring substance. Um
Speaker 1: they once thought that. But I mean they're still pretty good.
Speaker 1: We can use them for abrasive purposes, like diamond drill bits, right,
Speaker 1: which are not made of pure diamond the way that's
Speaker 1: a James Bond movie drill bit would would be made.
Speaker 1: It just got diamond dust and an extremely extravagant drill.
Speaker 1: I kind of kind of want that drill. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna lie the most lavish tool bench every Yeah it's
Speaker 1: made of gold and you're just like drilling gold on
Speaker 1: a Saturday for fun. Um No, So, but yeah, you
Speaker 1: would have incorporated little pieces of diamonds to help make
Speaker 1: it harder. Right, Because because although they may not be
Speaker 1: the hardest naturally occurring substance. They're harder than many other things.
Speaker 1: They had pretty much everything else. Yeah. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: also you can you can like grind up diamond dust
Speaker 1: and use that as like an abrasive paste. It's really powerful.
Speaker 1: UM And actually funny little tidbit isn't totally related, but
Speaker 1: I just couldn't resist. In case you all have never
Speaker 1: heard of this, UM, there's at least one known exo
Speaker 1: planet out there that may be made of diamond entirely
Speaker 1: of diamond entirely. Not entirely, no, but but still a
Speaker 1: significant significant portion of the planet may be made of diamonds.
Speaker 1: It's can cree E. It's planet's about forty light years
Speaker 1: away from this solar system and it's in the constellation
Speaker 1: Cancer UM. And we don't know it's composition for sure,
Speaker 1: but basically last year UM they looked at its transit
Speaker 1: signature across the star in that solar system out there,
Speaker 1: and based on that information, they deduced that it might
Speaker 1: be a hard carbon planet, that it might a significant
Speaker 1: amount of its structure might be pure diamond. Sweet, there's
Speaker 1: the I. I just that just reminds me of this
Speaker 1: Doctor Who episode where wherein they were stuck on a
Speaker 1: diamond planet, and really terrifying things happened. It was very upsetting.
Speaker 1: If they were on this planet would be terrifying because
Speaker 1: it's like it's the hottest place ever just that there
Speaker 1: ever was. I think, well that that would also not
Speaker 1: be good uh less less good for resort stays. But
Speaker 1: actually so that wouldn't Even if this planet were made
Speaker 1: entirely of diamonds, it wouldn't be the hardest planet possible. Um. No,
Speaker 1: you could make harder planets out of a couple of
Speaker 1: other naturally occurring materials. Um. I'm going to refer to
Speaker 1: the findings reported in a two thousand nine Physical Review
Speaker 1: Letters paper called Harder than Diamond Superior indentation strength of
Speaker 1: word site, boron nitride and lawnsdale light by Pan Sung
Speaker 1: Jiang and Chin uh And that, yeah, that named a
Speaker 1: couple of things that have been found in nature that
Speaker 1: are actually harder than a diamond. And so word site
Speaker 1: boron nitride and the molecule is born nitride. Word site
Speaker 1: refers to the crystal structure of it, and that's formed
Speaker 1: in volcanic eruptions. And apparently this stuff they found could
Speaker 1: withstand eighteen percent more indentation stress than a diamond lawnsdale light.
Speaker 1: Note how it just horribly Yeah, it doesn't unpleasant. These
Speaker 1: names are tongue the way that diamond does. I mean. Also,
Speaker 1: I guess there hasn't been entire industry selling me um
Speaker 1: lawnsdalelight since I was a tiny child as a symbol
Speaker 1: of hope for my romantic future. Yeah, Lonsdale eight is
Speaker 1: basically it's a different form of diamond kind of it's
Speaker 1: a hexagonally configured diamond. These hexagonal structures you're gonna see
Speaker 1: are really important. But it's uh, it's found in tiny quantities,
Speaker 1: I like in some meteorites sometimes, and it could withstand
Speaker 1: fifty eight percent condentations dressed in diamonds. So these are
Speaker 1: things you can find in nature, though admittedly in pretty
Speaker 1: tiny quantities. All Right, you're not gonna just just stumble
Speaker 1: across the whole rock of that. What if if you're
Speaker 1: out for a walk or something. Yeah, Now, something you're
Speaker 1: probably not going to find in nature is aggregated diamond
Speaker 1: nano rods. Aggregated diamond nano rod sounds like an eighties
Speaker 1: insult exact nano rod. Yeah, we're well, we're all nano
Speaker 1: rods around here. But basically it's a It comes from carbon,
Speaker 1: and a lot of these very resilient materials are made
Speaker 1: of carbon um. But basically it's a way of processing
Speaker 1: carbon high heat and pressure into this higher density diamond
Speaker 1: form um and based. These things could also be really
Speaker 1: useful in industrial settings like diamonds. Uh, they're a little
Speaker 1: stronger and they could be used for machine ing or abrasives. Um.
Speaker 1: They're basically like beefed up diamonds stuff. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's that's cool, and that makes sense a lot of
Speaker 1: what we're talking about because because carbon is is a
Speaker 1: type of atom that can bond really easily with other stuff,
Speaker 1: including itself, it can form into all different um allotropes
Speaker 1: of of carbon, which is where you get you know,
Speaker 1: the fact that that graphite is one of the softest
Speaker 1: naturally occurring substances that we know and diamond is one
Speaker 1: of the hardest, and they're both made of the same stuff,
Speaker 1: just arranged slightly differently. So so that's so that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: This is this is all good. Well, I wanted to
Speaker 1: give one more shout out something that occurs in the
Speaker 1: natural world, again, not indestructible, but spider silk, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: i'd i'd read about that. Um it's being ridiculously tensile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's got a high tensile strength, which is different. Um. Basically,
Speaker 1: what that means is you can pull it like a
Speaker 1: rope without it snapping, and you can even know it's
Speaker 1: a thread thread thin. Yeah, incredibly high weight load bearing
Speaker 1: on that. So and that just comes out of a
Speaker 1: spider's butt. So that's pretty impressive, right. Yeah. Not many
Speaker 1: things that are that strong are made that easily. UM.
Speaker 1: For for example, graphing is another one of these allotropes
Speaker 1: of well, okay, it's it's graphing is a is a
Speaker 1: single layer of carbon atoms that are arranged in this
Speaker 1: hexagonal matrix. Um. So, so it's a single atom thick
Speaker 1: sheet of graphite. UM. I'm not buying it. That's super
Speaker 1: hard right now, It's really it's really, it's really quite hard. Um. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, graphites a crystal form of carbon, and so
Speaker 1: when you get this this atom thick sheet, um, it
Speaker 1: can be six times lighter and a hundred times stronger
Speaker 1: than steel of the same thickness. Um. It's it's just
Speaker 1: the way that it does. UM. I mean, basically, since
Speaker 1: it's a technically a two dimensional object, or as close
Speaker 1: as we can get to to a two dimensional object
Speaker 1: that we can still perceive. Since it's an atom thick um,
Speaker 1: you would have to bust apart the atoms to really
Speaker 1: get it to break, which is not that easy to do. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: it also comes I mean by by the time that
Speaker 1: you've got graphine um. This this is what carbon nanotubes
Speaker 1: are made of. Most of the time you're going to
Speaker 1: roll it up into these into these couple atom thick
Speaker 1: tubes of of awesome um that you can use to
Speaker 1: do a lot of different stuff. I think carbon nanotubes
Speaker 1: for me, they fit into the category of science magic
Speaker 1: where it's like there are two main things. There's nanotechnology
Speaker 1: and carbon nanotubes, and anytime you need magic to happen,
Speaker 1: you just say, yeah, just put some carbon nanotubes in there.
Speaker 1: It's one or the other. But but there may be
Speaker 1: a good reason for that, because these things are pretty
Speaker 1: dern magical. Yeah. And in addition to being that strong,
Speaker 1: it's more conducive than copper. They can either emit or
Speaker 1: absorb light depending on what you're having them do. Um.
Speaker 1: One of my h they were okay, so so Graphing
Speaker 1: was known about in theory for decades, but it was
Speaker 1: never created in practice until around two thousand four. Assists
Speaker 1: and researchers in a laboratory. Um, we're using scotch tape
Speaker 1: like sellotape to to clean the surface of blocks of graphite.
Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden they noticed they they
Speaker 1: like pulled. They wanted to get it cleaner, and so
Speaker 1: they were using the sticky stuff and then they pulled
Speaker 1: it up and kind of noted that there was this
Speaker 1: near translucent, very thin layers of graphite stuck to the
Speaker 1: scotch tape. And they were like, oh, that's interesting. That's
Speaker 1: the interesting parts. We were just throwing that away. You
Speaker 1: put on your face to clean your pores. You've seen
Speaker 1: those commercials, right, except it for graphic creates the hardest
Speaker 1: substance on earth, right. Yeah, no, And this is a
Speaker 1: legit scientific way of making sheets of graphing. Well, it's
Speaker 1: a little bit thicker at that point. These days they're
Speaker 1: using pretty precise, like heat scraping methods. I don't entirely
Speaker 1: understand without looking at that a whole lot, but um,
Speaker 1: but so okay, So, so you can use this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff for I mean, the big one that everyone
Speaker 1: is always excited about with graphine and carbon nanotubes is
Speaker 1: space elevators, right, because you've you've got to make that
Speaker 1: tether that so strong and so thin. Just a refresher
Speaker 1: if you haven't listened to our space elevator episode. And
Speaker 1: the idea is that you have a base on Earth
Speaker 1: with a flexible tether running out into space to a
Speaker 1: place in geo stationary orbit, and basically, um the two
Speaker 1: forces are pulling, so gravity is pulling down on the tether,
Speaker 1: and then the centrifugal force of spinning around with the
Speaker 1: Earth is pulling up on the tether, getting it tout right,
Speaker 1: and by both those forces pulling in the opposite directions,
Speaker 1: it stays so that you can climb it with a
Speaker 1: climbing vehicle. The problem is to make a tether like this,
Speaker 1: it would have to be so strong it's just unthinkable,
Speaker 1: all right, and the way that steel works, it would
Speaker 1: have to be you know, like a you miles wide,
Speaker 1: I think, in order to make it strong enough to
Speaker 1: go that high. It's like something completely ridiculous, right, that
Speaker 1: is just not practical in any way, um on on
Speaker 1: a smaller scale, alright, So uh, typically speaking, your carbon nantitubes,
Speaker 1: even in a really ideal lab environment, are only going
Speaker 1: to be a few centimeters long. I think that researchers
Speaker 1: just have made one that was like half a meter long,
Speaker 1: and everyone is incredibly impressed by this. But researchers at
Speaker 1: Rice University have created a UM a process called wet spinning,
Speaker 1: which which kind of which kind of smooshes them together
Speaker 1: and like like sort of dissolves them and then re
Speaker 1: smoshes them in a very specific way that can form
Speaker 1: this thread UM and then you can spin this threat
Speaker 1: into spools and you can use it to for example,
Speaker 1: both hang and power and LED lamp at the same time,
Speaker 1: because because it's conducive and it's super strong and so
Speaker 1: and so this is you know, that kind of process
Speaker 1: I think is going to may be some day hopefully
Speaker 1: lead us up to space elevators. But right now I'm
Speaker 1: pretty impressed that they're hanging a lamp. That's pretty awesome, UM,
Speaker 1: and elevators kind of like hanging lamp, a very large
Speaker 1: geostationary lamp. Yeah yeah, sorry, please go ahead, no no, UM.
Speaker 1: I was also going to say that, you know, people
Speaker 1: talk about incorporating carbonana tubes into other materials like uh,
Speaker 1: like like again the body of planes or cars. This
Speaker 1: is going to It would make something that's very lightweight
Speaker 1: but hypothetically very strong, which is good for for fuel
Speaker 1: efficiency and all kinds of fancy stuff like that. Also,
Speaker 1: since they're conducive, you could put them into stuff like
Speaker 1: a like computer chips hypothetically and uh and make some
Speaker 1: some really fancy stuff like that. Awesome. Yeah, I've actually
Speaker 1: read about that being used in h microprocessors. But what's
Speaker 1: the deal with carbine? Jonathan talked about it in the
Speaker 1: video and he's not here to explain it to me,
Speaker 1: all right. Carbine. Carbine is another allotrope of carbon more carbon. Specifically,
Speaker 1: it is linear act alnic carbon I'm gonna go with
Speaker 1: that pronunciation u uh, and it forms in a single
Speaker 1: chain of atoms, the most successful form so far as pollens,
Speaker 1: which are alternating single and triple atomic bonds in the
Speaker 1: single chain. And since it's a single chain, it's sometimes
Speaker 1: referred to as being a one dimensional object, as opposed
Speaker 1: to the kind of two dimensional graphing plane, which is
Speaker 1: not really um but it also doesn't I mean, okay,
Speaker 1: so so people have kind of almost made it happen
Speaker 1: in labs, but most of the time when they try
Speaker 1: to create it in labs, it's sort of this black
Speaker 1: goo at the bottom of a test tube that no
Speaker 1: one can really do anything with. It mostly exists in
Speaker 1: theory and as computer models because these things are just
Speaker 1: just really hard to make and not superstable as of yet. Um.
Speaker 1: But hypothetically the stuff could be twice as strong as
Speaker 1: graphing in terms of tensile strength, and um three times stiffer,
Speaker 1: like harder than diamond. So yeah, that's pretty good. Also,
Speaker 1: when you twist it like ninety degrees from its normal state,
Speaker 1: it could act as a magnetic semiconductor, so important stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, it could be really lightweight and have a
Speaker 1: huge surface area if you could, you know, create threads
Speaker 1: of this and use those to create some kind of
Speaker 1: three dimensional object, and therefore it could be amazing for
Speaker 1: making like battery electrodes or chemical sensors, anything that you want.
Speaker 1: Those those properties in space elevators. Again, space elevators, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's nice. The future is carbon related space elevators of
Speaker 1: some kind. Well, so pretty much everything we've talked about
Speaker 1: so far is carbon based. But I do you want
Speaker 1: to talk about something with special properties that's not heard of,
Speaker 1: super alloys. I have not to tell me about them,
Speaker 1: super alloys, Okay. So basically they're they're alloy metals that
Speaker 1: have good performance in extreme conditions. So you can think
Speaker 1: about like nickel alloys and what they do. As they say,
Speaker 1: it's strong at really really high heat, whereas something like steel, say,
Speaker 1: might be weakened structurally by high heat. Yeah. These nickel
Speaker 1: super alloys, you can heat them way up and they
Speaker 1: still stay strong, and they also resist corrosion, and this
Speaker 1: makes them ideal for stuff like gas turbine parts. So
Speaker 1: it's really hot in there, they're not going to get
Speaker 1: distorted or be more prone to breaking over time than
Speaker 1: become brittle the way that right, normal metal might. Right,
Speaker 1: So this would make them great, say in jet jet
Speaker 1: engines for airplanes, or in like power generator hardware. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: Also an interesting thing is that it was a nickel
Speaker 1: alloy that Jonathan was talking about in the video when
Speaker 1: he referred to the m I T scientists discovering the
Speaker 1: self healing materials. Yeah yeah, yeah. So this was another
Speaker 1: paper in Physical Review Letters published October. It was called
Speaker 1: Healing Nano Cracks by disclinations but zoo and dim cowits.
Speaker 1: And essentially what this showed was that nano cracks, so
Speaker 1: really tiny fractures in the in the plane of the
Speaker 1: metal would repair themselves without being compressed together. Um. And
Speaker 1: so these like these little tiny crystal in structures within
Speaker 1: the metal would would gloop back together without having to
Speaker 1: be pushed into each other. And so so we're basically
Speaker 1: talking about yeah kind of yeah Patrick nano scale. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: hopefully less grumpy than him, because you know, he never
Speaker 1: had that sense of humor like the the original Terminator
Speaker 1: did he really he really never He never made any jokes.
Speaker 1: He had just dour about everything killing all the time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Hopefully these crystal defects have you know, less interest in
Speaker 1: the total destruction of the human race. Yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: fingers crossed, Yeah, okay, So I want to I want
Speaker 1: to talk about one more thing that. Um, the funny
Speaker 1: thing you'll know this is that none of these that
Speaker 1: we've talked about are actually indestructible, uh spoiler. We don't
Speaker 1: know of any material that's actually indestructible in the way
Speaker 1: that we talked about at the beginning, and that it's
Speaker 1: impossible to cause it to fail structurally, right, But aren't
Speaker 1: there basically a lot of of elements that we don't
Speaker 1: really know the full scope of properties of. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is another thing I wanted to talk about. When we're
Speaker 1: speaking about materials with special properties, you can pull up
Speaker 1: the periodic table and you can look at it and say, hmm, okay,
Speaker 1: well we're focusing a lot on this one square of it,
Speaker 1: which is carbon. Or you can make molecules out of,
Speaker 1: you know, combining different combining different stuff, and we're getting
Speaker 1: pretty good at creating computer models of what that would
Speaker 1: look like without ever having to actually smooth atoms together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we've got nothing indestructible yet. But um, there's if
Speaker 1: you go down to the bottom of the periodic table,
Speaker 1: all these weird symbols like you you p U T
Speaker 1: you know what is all that about. I have never
Speaker 1: had any idea at all. After like Boron, I'm just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it gets boring after Boron. No, actually it doesn't. It
Speaker 1: gets really interestingly Yeah, Okay, So I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about a little bit earlier this year, something that happened,
Speaker 1: um was that a group of scientists confirmed the synthesis
Speaker 1: of element one fifteen otherwise known as unnpenti um um.
Speaker 1: That just that again pentium. Either way, it rolls off
Speaker 1: the tongue much like those. It's a horrible name and
Speaker 1: it's a temporary name. The way they come up with
Speaker 1: names for what these are called are transuranic elements. There
Speaker 1: are there are all these elements that are way up
Speaker 1: higher than uranium, because uranium is the biggest element that
Speaker 1: you're likely to find in nature. So yeah, you can
Speaker 1: find hunks of uranium in the desert. You're never going
Speaker 1: to find a hunk of unupenti um in the desert.
Speaker 1: And and that's because of the the molecular are not molecular,
Speaker 1: but the atomic structure, because because it's such a heavy
Speaker 1: I mean that's that's a dred and fifteen protons and
Speaker 1: in a single nucleus. Yeah, yeah, exactly um. And so
Speaker 1: the bigger these nucle i get when you're making these
Speaker 1: bigger elements, they tend to split apart really fast um.
Speaker 1: And that's why you don't find them in nature. Obviously,
Speaker 1: even if they'd been fused in nature, they wouldn't hang
Speaker 1: around for very long. And by not very long, we're
Speaker 1: talking about like like fractions of a second right. Um,
Speaker 1: so how do we discover these new things? Well, we
Speaker 1: actually create them. We create these higher level elements in
Speaker 1: the lab by smashing together elements with lower atomic numbers
Speaker 1: and hoping that they combine to produce this bigger atom.
Speaker 1: So so like in a in a particle accelerator, this
Speaker 1: kind of thing would be going on exactly right. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they recently confirmed earlier scientists us in dubbed No
Speaker 1: Russia and Lawrence Livermore had created element one um and
Speaker 1: that was I think in two thousand three, but they
Speaker 1: just now confirmed it that they recreated it and so
Speaker 1: hopefully it's going to get a permanent name. Some of
Speaker 1: these other ones don't have those weird like systematic names,
Speaker 1: liken pentium, which actually just means one one five e
Speaker 1: m um um, pretty clever. Yeah. But the cool thing
Speaker 1: about all these is that, um, we don't know for
Speaker 1: sure all of the properties of these elements until we
Speaker 1: synthesize them. So if we could we we could create
Speaker 1: some and get it to stabilize enough to hang out
Speaker 1: for more than a few fractions of a second, then um,
Speaker 1: then yeah, it might it might be able to do.
Speaker 1: Who knows, Yeah, it might work, might have a technological application. Um,
Speaker 1: this shows up in science fiction and there's actually there
Speaker 1: was a UFO conspiracy theorist named Bob Lasar, and if
Speaker 1: you read about him, I don't think so. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he claimed that he worked at air A fifty one
Speaker 1: and that he worked on alien spacecraft. What he said
Speaker 1: was that they used that their anti gravity fuel was
Speaker 1: made of elopment one ff of on unpentium. Well that
Speaker 1: seems unlikely. No, it's not true at all. Um, It's
Speaker 1: obviously he's not telling the truth about that. But what
Speaker 1: it highlights, what I said in my blog, is that
Speaker 1: he couldn't say that about lead, I mean, just because
Speaker 1: we know. But it does highlight the unknown potential of
Speaker 1: these as yet undiscovered atoms. And so uh, if you
Speaker 1: could find atoms that were really big and actually did
Speaker 1: stay around for a long time before breaking apart at
Speaker 1: the nucleus, that could be cool. Maybe they actually would
Speaker 1: be useful in some technological sense. Um, So are we
Speaker 1: ever going to find atoms like that? Well, we don't know.
Speaker 1: But there is this idea. It's called the island of stability,
Speaker 1: and it's been theorized by people like in Seaborg, who
Speaker 1: was a chemist who won the Nobel Prize he discovered
Speaker 1: plutonium um and uh, what he said is that, look,
Speaker 1: you know, it could be that we get up to
Speaker 1: a certain point on the periodic table and we actually
Speaker 1: find some really really big atoms that, because of the
Speaker 1: you know, the structure of the nucleus and the ratio
Speaker 1: of neutrons to protons within the nucleus, don't fly apart immediately.
Speaker 1: They're more stable than all of the ones around them.
Speaker 1: So they're in this sea of instability, but they're the
Speaker 1: island of stability. I haven't found anything like that yet.
Speaker 1: The really high numbers we've found so far are short lived,
Speaker 1: but uh, it's cool to keep looking. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: if there is an entire planet mostly made of diamond
Speaker 1: out there, then I think that probably the universe is
Speaker 1: a very strange and wonderful place we should continue exploring. Yet. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: well I think that's enough for today. Um, now that
Speaker 1: we've talked about some very very special material. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: we we hope that you have enjoyed this kind of
Speaker 1: addendum to two Johnson's video. If you didn't check that out,
Speaker 1: then going over to you Forward thinking dot com. That's
Speaker 1: FW Thinking dot com and you can. You can also
Speaker 1: find all of our podcasts and blog posts over there
Speaker 1: and get in touch with us and we'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. For more on this topic and
Speaker 1: the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com, brought
Speaker 1: to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,