Indestructible Materialism

Star Trek. We're we're all we're all pretty silly right now. But yeah, well so he is out and we hope he's feeling better soon. But we're going to take you on a little brain journey with the two of us. And today we wanted to talk about following up with a recent video that Jonathan recorded about indestructible materials, right because because this whole Thoor film series has come out, and so we were thinking a lot about Uru, the mystical material that Thor's hammer is made out of, which

is completely indestructible. I don't know how much you can really think about Uru, but I get what you're saying I don't know. I've known some nerds that would probably disagree with you, um, that have thought long and hard. But but yeah, so so what I got there? Hard? Oh I didn't even mean to pun. This is going to be I'm sorry, guys. I apologize accidental puns or even worse than ones on purpose. Okay, Well, what's the concept.

It's a it's a hammer that's like super hard. You can't miss smash a lot of stuff with it without making it smash. Yeah, which which material scientists are actually working on? I mean maybe not in the thor hammer applications specifically that I'm personally aware of. If if this research is being done, it's not being reported to me personally. Um. But but but I mean, but that would be pretty cool, right, having having material that that you can do a lot

of stuff too and it doesn't get hurt. Yeah. Um, So if we're on a search for an indestructible material, I want to think about for a second, like what that would really mean, because in one sense, you can't really have an indestructible material because material is made of atoms, right, and we know that even atoms themselves can be destroyed. Yeah, atoms can be destroyed as in converted into energy in

a nuclear reaction. Right, That's what you do when you split an atom to create break the protons of the nucleus apart from from the electrons in a you know, if if if you're really trying hard, but that's difficult a splitting the atom. Yeah. So I think what we mean when we're talking about indestructible materials is a a material structure on a scale that's meaningful to us that doesn't I'm gonna use an Internet word here, that doesn't fail structurally. So it's a it's it would never make

it onto the chemistry fail blog. Okay, yeah, I know that makes sense. In terms of material science. When you're talking about a a fail proof material, you can you can talk about kind of three different categories. It's it's hardness, which is going to be it's its resistance um to to localized deformation a k A like scratching um. If if you can poke it, scratch it, a braise it, dent it um, then it's hardness is poor all right. Um. Then you've got strength, which is the ability of a

material to withstand applied stress without fracture um without breaking right. So, so within this category you've got like um tent sile strength, which is pulling, and compressive strength, which is pushing. So what we're talking about here is is yeah, like like tearing or ripping or smooching on the other end of it. Okay,

you're not talking about being deformed, but about coming apart, right, right. So, for for example, if you're talking about something really strong, it would be um like like ceramics or metals, and something really weak on on that scale would be something like would oh okay that you know that that you can can't you know ceramic You're not going to pull on it and you're not going to shred it, but right, And then that last category is going to be toughness,

which is um the the amount of energy and material can absorb before it cracks or breaks or otherwise permanently deforms. And that's how brittle an object is. So so going back to like ceramics, ceramics are very strong but also very brittle. Uh if you if you slack a hammer at them, whether it's made of ub or not, it's probably going to shatter into a billion pieces. Okay, So it's not like rubber, right right, rubber is is also

very tough, but um, but not hard at all. It's soft you can poke it and leave a dent and uh and not extremely strong. At a certain point it'll bust apart. Okay, So that's interesting. So we want to talk about materials that are resilient in these different ways. Um, But first of all, like do we really need this? Like what would you actually use a material that's all that hard for besides just a hammer? I mean, I understand weapons and armor, but do we always have to

be so violent? Like can we use these in a way that's that's nice. Well, going along with with armor, I guess you could use it for stain resistant clothing or stain proof clothing that's non violent and pretty cool. Oh yeah, Actually, well lots of violence isn't caused by people, right, So there's the violence that say an airplane with stands when it's flying high speed against wind resistance. You could, I guess build stronger airplane parts to like withstand all

that tension and what would you call it shaking? Yes, yeah? Or um or or engine parts even if if you if you make the plane engine out of parts that are extremely strong, then you know, not having some some part of an engine fail would be pretty good. Yeah, um, you could think about I guess load bearing features too, for building bridges and buildings and stuff like that. Yeah. Absolutely, I if fewer bridge fail years over over the test

of time would be great. Yeah. Actually, a YouTube comment or left a really cool comment on Jonathan's video, and we we generally do have awesome YouTube commenters. But I'm still personally a little bit just pleasantly shocked whenever someone says something nice and not terrible YouTube. So so good for good for you in particular, but but for thinking viewers in general. Yeah, yeah, we love our people YouTube broadly. You might be surprised if something nice happens. But yeah.

A commenter called the simulationist a little shout out there on the video left a great suggestion. They said, what about a sun probe? And I thought, oh wow, yeah, by that, I assumed this person meant a solar probe, like, you know, you're going to shoot into the body of the Sun and send information back. Um, so that could be really interesting. Now, that would be a certain specific type of material resilience. It would need to survive super high temperatures and gravity core, So I do want to

raise a question there. If we sent a probe straight into the Sun, and that probe were built out of some kind of magic material that meant it weren't destroyed, I wonder if it would be able to transmit information back to US UM because the Sun provides a lot of radiation interference. Like even when you have a satellite that's crossing across the sky, if when it's in transit across the Sun, meaning you know, the Sun is right behind it, we often have satellite outages because of the

interference caused by the Sun's radiation. So if something were like going all the way into the Sun, I would think that level of interference would be so strong it would be hard to get any information back from it at all. But sure, also I'm wondering, I'm wondering if you could um broadcast out from inside a material that's indestructible.

That sounds like maybe you would run into problems. I don't know, maybe, but still it's a cool idea, and I like the way the person that Yeah, but let's talk about some super strong or super hard or super tough materials. What's out there, what's the best we got Diamonds diamonds. Yeah, you always hear that, right, Diamonds they're

the strongest material, um, are they are? They not? Diamonds are hard, meaning they they resist they have strong resistance to indentation like we're talking about, so it's hard to like scratch them. And so this is true that they're very strong. I think for a long time people thought they were the strongest material. Uh, turns out they're not. Actually they're not even the hardest naturally occurring substance. Um they once thought that. But I mean they're still pretty good.

We can use them for abrasive purposes, like diamond drill bits, right, which are not made of pure diamond the way that's a James Bond movie drill bit would would be made. It just got diamond dust and an extremely extravagant drill. I kind of kind of want that drill. I'm not gonna lie the most lavish tool bench every Yeah it's made of gold and you're just like drilling gold on a Saturday for fun. Um No, So, but yeah, you would have incorporated little pieces of diamonds to help make

it harder. Right, Because because although they may not be the hardest naturally occurring substance. They're harder than many other things. They had pretty much everything else. Yeah. So yeah, and also you can you can like grind up diamond dust and use that as like an abrasive paste. It's really powerful. UM And actually funny little tidbit isn't totally related, but

I just couldn't resist. In case you all have never heard of this, UM, there's at least one known exo planet out there that may be made of diamond entirely of diamond entirely. Not entirely, no, but but still a significant significant portion of the planet may be made of diamonds. It's can cree E. It's planet's about forty light years away from this solar system and it's in the constellation

Cancer UM. And we don't know it's composition for sure, but basically last year UM they looked at its transit signature across the star in that solar system out there, and based on that information, they deduced that it might be a hard carbon planet, that it might a significant amount of its structure might be pure diamond. Sweet, there's the I. I just that just reminds me of this Doctor Who episode where wherein they were stuck on a

diamond planet, and really terrifying things happened. It was very upsetting. If they were on this planet would be terrifying because it's like it's the hottest place ever just that there ever was. I think, well that that would also not be good uh less less good for resort stays. But actually so that wouldn't Even if this planet were made entirely of diamonds, it wouldn't be the hardest planet possible. Um. No, you could make harder planets out of a couple of

other naturally occurring materials. Um. I'm going to refer to the findings reported in a two thousand nine Physical Review Letters paper called Harder than Diamond Superior indentation strength of word site, boron nitride and lawnsdale light by Pan Sung Jiang and Chin uh And that, yeah, that named a couple of things that have been found in nature that are actually harder than a diamond. And so word site

boron nitride and the molecule is born nitride. Word site refers to the crystal structure of it, and that's formed in volcanic eruptions. And apparently this stuff they found could withstand eighteen percent more indentation stress than a diamond lawnsdale light. Note how it just horribly Yeah, it doesn't unpleasant. These names are tongue the way that diamond does. I mean. Also, I guess there hasn't been entire industry selling me um lawnsdalelight since I was a tiny child as a symbol

of hope for my romantic future. Yeah, Lonsdale eight is basically it's a different form of diamond kind of it's a hexagonally configured diamond. These hexagonal structures you're gonna see are really important. But it's uh, it's found in tiny quantities, I like in some meteorites sometimes, and it could withstand fifty eight percent condentations dressed in diamonds. So these are things you can find in nature, though admittedly in pretty

tiny quantities. All Right, you're not gonna just just stumble across the whole rock of that. What if if you're out for a walk or something. Yeah, Now, something you're probably not going to find in nature is aggregated diamond nano rods. Aggregated diamond nano rod sounds like an eighties insult exact nano rod. Yeah, we're well, we're all nano rods around here. But basically it's a It comes from carbon, and a lot of these very resilient materials are made

of carbon um. But basically it's a way of processing carbon high heat and pressure into this higher density diamond form um and based. These things could also be really useful in industrial settings like diamonds. Uh, they're a little stronger and they could be used for machine ing or abrasives. Um.

They're basically like beefed up diamonds stuff. No, no, no, that's that's cool, and that makes sense a lot of what we're talking about because because carbon is is a type of atom that can bond really easily with other stuff, including itself, it can form into all different um allotropes of of carbon, which is where you get you know, the fact that that graphite is one of the softest naturally occurring substances that we know and diamond is one

of the hardest, and they're both made of the same stuff, just arranged slightly differently. So so that's so that's fascinating. This is this is all good. Well, I wanted to give one more shout out something that occurs in the natural world, again, not indestructible, but spider silk, right, yeah, i'd i'd read about that. Um it's being ridiculously tensile. Yeah,

it's it's got a high tensile strength, which is different. Um. Basically, what that means is you can pull it like a rope without it snapping, and you can even know it's a thread thread thin. Yeah, incredibly high weight load bearing on that. So and that just comes out of a spider's butt. So that's pretty impressive, right. Yeah. Not many

things that are that strong are made that easily. UM. For for example, graphing is another one of these allotropes of well, okay, it's it's graphing is a is a single layer of carbon atoms that are arranged in this hexagonal matrix. Um. So, so it's a single atom thick sheet of graphite. UM. I'm not buying it. That's super

hard right now, It's really it's really, it's really quite hard. Um. Uh. You know, graphites a crystal form of carbon, and so when you get this this atom thick sheet, um, it can be six times lighter and a hundred times stronger than steel of the same thickness. Um. It's it's just the way that it does. UM. I mean, basically, since it's a technically a two dimensional object, or as close as we can get to to a two dimensional object

that we can still perceive. Since it's an atom thick um, you would have to bust apart the atoms to really get it to break, which is not that easy to do. Unfortunately, it also comes I mean by by the time that you've got graphine um. This this is what carbon nanotubes are made of. Most of the time you're going to roll it up into these into these couple atom thick tubes of of awesome um that you can use to

do a lot of different stuff. I think carbon nanotubes for me, they fit into the category of science magic where it's like there are two main things. There's nanotechnology and carbon nanotubes, and anytime you need magic to happen, you just say, yeah, just put some carbon nanotubes in there. It's one or the other. But but there may be a good reason for that, because these things are pretty dern magical. Yeah. And in addition to being that strong,

it's more conducive than copper. They can either emit or absorb light depending on what you're having them do. Um. One of my h they were okay, so so Graphing was known about in theory for decades, but it was never created in practice until around two thousand four. Assists and researchers in a laboratory. Um, we're using scotch tape like sellotape to to clean the surface of blocks of graphite. And then all of a sudden they noticed they they

like pulled. They wanted to get it cleaner, and so they were using the sticky stuff and then they pulled it up and kind of noted that there was this near translucent, very thin layers of graphite stuck to the scotch tape. And they were like, oh, that's interesting. That's the interesting parts. We were just throwing that away. You put on your face to clean your pores. You've seen those commercials, right, except it for graphic creates the hardest

substance on earth, right. Yeah, no, And this is a legit scientific way of making sheets of graphing. Well, it's a little bit thicker at that point. These days they're

using pretty precise, like heat scraping methods. I don't entirely understand without looking at that a whole lot, but um, but so okay, So, so you can use this kind of stuff for I mean, the big one that everyone is always excited about with graphine and carbon nanotubes is space elevators, right, because you've you've got to make that tether that so strong and so thin. Just a refresher

if you haven't listened to our space elevator episode. And the idea is that you have a base on Earth with a flexible tether running out into space to a place in geo stationary orbit, and basically, um the two forces are pulling, so gravity is pulling down on the tether, and then the centrifugal force of spinning around with the Earth is pulling up on the tether, getting it tout right, and by both those forces pulling in the opposite directions, it stays so that you can climb it with a

climbing vehicle. The problem is to make a tether like this, it would have to be so strong it's just unthinkable, all right, and the way that steel works, it would have to be you know, like a you miles wide, I think, in order to make it strong enough to go that high. It's like something completely ridiculous, right, that is just not practical in any way, um on on a smaller scale, alright, So uh, typically speaking, your carbon nantitubes, even in a really ideal lab environment, are only going

to be a few centimeters long. I think that researchers just have made one that was like half a meter long,

and everyone is incredibly impressed by this. But researchers at Rice University have created a UM a process called wet spinning, which which kind of which kind of smooshes them together and like like sort of dissolves them and then re smoshes them in a very specific way that can form this thread UM and then you can spin this threat into spools and you can use it to for example, both hang and power and LED lamp at the same time, because because it's conducive and it's super strong and so

and so this is you know, that kind of process I think is going to may be some day hopefully lead us up to space elevators. But right now I'm pretty impressed that they're hanging a lamp. That's pretty awesome, UM, and elevators kind of like hanging lamp, a very large geostationary lamp. Yeah yeah, sorry, please go ahead, no no, UM. I was also going to say that, you know, people talk about incorporating carbonana tubes into other materials like uh,

like like again the body of planes or cars. This is going to It would make something that's very lightweight but hypothetically very strong, which is good for for fuel efficiency and all kinds of fancy stuff like that. Also, since they're conducive, you could put them into stuff like a like computer chips hypothetically and uh and make some some really fancy stuff like that. Awesome. Yeah, I've actually read about that being used in h microprocessors. But what's

the deal with carbine? Jonathan talked about it in the video and he's not here to explain it to me, all right. Carbine. Carbine is another allotrope of carbon more carbon. Specifically, it is linear act alnic carbon I'm gonna go with that pronunciation u uh, and it forms in a single chain of atoms, the most successful form so far as pollens, which are alternating single and triple atomic bonds in the

single chain. And since it's a single chain, it's sometimes referred to as being a one dimensional object, as opposed to the kind of two dimensional graphing plane, which is not really um but it also doesn't I mean, okay, so so people have kind of almost made it happen in labs, but most of the time when they try to create it in labs, it's sort of this black goo at the bottom of a test tube that no

one can really do anything with. It mostly exists in theory and as computer models because these things are just just really hard to make and not superstable as of yet. Um. But hypothetically the stuff could be twice as strong as graphing in terms of tensile strength, and um three times stiffer, like harder than diamond. So yeah, that's pretty good. Also, when you twist it like ninety degrees from its normal state, it could act as a magnetic semiconductor, so important stuff.

You know, it could be really lightweight and have a huge surface area if you could, you know, create threads of this and use those to create some kind of three dimensional object, and therefore it could be amazing for making like battery electrodes or chemical sensors, anything that you want. Those those properties in space elevators. Again, space elevators, Yeah, it's nice. The future is carbon related space elevators of some kind. Well, so pretty much everything we've talked about

so far is carbon based. But I do you want to talk about something with special properties that's not heard of, super alloys. I have not to tell me about them, super alloys, Okay. So basically they're they're alloy metals that have good performance in extreme conditions. So you can think about like nickel alloys and what they do. As they say, it's strong at really really high heat, whereas something like steel, say,

might be weakened structurally by high heat. Yeah. These nickel super alloys, you can heat them way up and they still stay strong, and they also resist corrosion, and this makes them ideal for stuff like gas turbine parts. So it's really hot in there, they're not going to get distorted or be more prone to breaking over time than become brittle the way that right, normal metal might. Right, So this would make them great, say in jet jet

engines for airplanes, or in like power generator hardware. Yeah. Um. Also an interesting thing is that it was a nickel alloy that Jonathan was talking about in the video when he referred to the m I T scientists discovering the self healing materials. Yeah yeah, yeah. So this was another paper in Physical Review Letters published October. It was called Healing Nano Cracks by disclinations but zoo and dim cowits.

And essentially what this showed was that nano cracks, so really tiny fractures in the in the plane of the metal would repair themselves without being compressed together. Um. And so these like these little tiny crystal in structures within the metal would would gloop back together without having to be pushed into each other. And so so we're basically

talking about yeah kind of yeah Patrick nano scale. Yeah. Um, hopefully less grumpy than him, because you know, he never had that sense of humor like the the original Terminator did he really he really never He never made any jokes. He had just dour about everything killing all the time. Yeah. Hopefully these crystal defects have you know, less interest in the total destruction of the human race. Yeah, yeah, okay, fingers crossed, Yeah, okay, So I want to I want

to talk about one more thing that. Um, the funny thing you'll know this is that none of these that we've talked about are actually indestructible, uh spoiler. We don't know of any material that's actually indestructible in the way that we talked about at the beginning, and that it's impossible to cause it to fail structurally, right, But aren't there basically a lot of of elements that we don't really know the full scope of properties of. Yeah, this

is another thing I wanted to talk about. When we're speaking about materials with special properties, you can pull up the periodic table and you can look at it and say, hmm, okay, well we're focusing a lot on this one square of it, which is carbon. Or you can make molecules out of, you know, combining different combining different stuff, and we're getting pretty good at creating computer models of what that would look like without ever having to actually smooth atoms together. Yeah,

but we've got nothing indestructible yet. But um, there's if you go down to the bottom of the periodic table, all these weird symbols like you you p U T you know what is all that about. I have never had any idea at all. After like Boron, I'm just like, yeah,

it gets boring after Boron. No, actually it doesn't. It gets really interestingly Yeah, Okay, So I wanted to talk about a little bit earlier this year, something that happened, um was that a group of scientists confirmed the synthesis of element one fifteen otherwise known as unnpenti um um. That just that again pentium. Either way, it rolls off the tongue much like those. It's a horrible name and it's a temporary name. The way they come up with

names for what these are called are transuranic elements. There are there are all these elements that are way up higher than uranium, because uranium is the biggest element that you're likely to find in nature. So yeah, you can find hunks of uranium in the desert. You're never going to find a hunk of unupenti um in the desert.

And and that's because of the the molecular are not molecular, but the atomic structure, because because it's such a heavy I mean that's that's a dred and fifteen protons and in a single nucleus. Yeah, yeah, exactly um. And so the bigger these nucle i get when you're making these bigger elements, they tend to split apart really fast um. And that's why you don't find them in nature. Obviously, even if they'd been fused in nature, they wouldn't hang

around for very long. And by not very long, we're talking about like like fractions of a second right. Um, so how do we discover these new things? Well, we actually create them. We create these higher level elements in the lab by smashing together elements with lower atomic numbers and hoping that they combine to produce this bigger atom. So so like in a in a particle accelerator, this

kind of thing would be going on exactly right. Um. Yeah, So they recently confirmed earlier scientists us in dubbed No Russia and Lawrence Livermore had created element one um and that was I think in two thousand three, but they just now confirmed it that they recreated it and so hopefully it's going to get a permanent name. Some of these other ones don't have those weird like systematic names, liken pentium, which actually just means one one five e

m um um, pretty clever. Yeah. But the cool thing about all these is that, um, we don't know for sure all of the properties of these elements until we synthesize them. So if we could we we could create some and get it to stabilize enough to hang out for more than a few fractions of a second, then um, then yeah, it might it might be able to do.

Who knows, Yeah, it might work, might have a technological application. Um, this shows up in science fiction and there's actually there was a UFO conspiracy theorist named Bob Lasar, and if you read about him, I don't think so. Now. Yeah, he claimed that he worked at air A fifty one and that he worked on alien spacecraft. What he said was that they used that their anti gravity fuel was made of elopment one ff of on unpentium. Well that seems unlikely. No, it's not true at all. Um, It's

obviously he's not telling the truth about that. But what it highlights, what I said in my blog, is that he couldn't say that about lead, I mean, just because we know. But it does highlight the unknown potential of these as yet undiscovered atoms. And so uh, if you could find atoms that were really big and actually did stay around for a long time before breaking apart at the nucleus, that could be cool. Maybe they actually would be useful in some technological sense. Um, So are we

ever going to find atoms like that? Well, we don't know.

But there is this idea. It's called the island of stability, and it's been theorized by people like in Seaborg, who was a chemist who won the Nobel Prize he discovered plutonium um and uh, what he said is that, look, you know, it could be that we get up to a certain point on the periodic table and we actually find some really really big atoms that, because of the you know, the structure of the nucleus and the ratio of neutrons to protons within the nucleus, don't fly apart immediately.

They're more stable than all of the ones around them. So they're in this sea of instability, but they're the island of stability. I haven't found anything like that yet. The really high numbers we've found so far are short lived, but uh, it's cool to keep looking. Yeah, I mean, if there is an entire planet mostly made of diamond out there, then I think that probably the universe is a very strange and wonderful place we should continue exploring. Yet. Yeah, Okay,

well I think that's enough for today. Um, now that we've talked about some very very special material. Yes, um, we we hope that you have enjoyed this kind of addendum to two Johnson's video. If you didn't check that out, then going over to you Forward thinking dot com. That's FW Thinking dot com and you can. You can also find all of our podcasts and blog posts over there and get in touch with us and we'll talk to

you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,