TechStuff Gets Meta(material)

the concept of invisibility in FICTIONUS? Uh, probably the Ronnie Lank cloaking device, Yeah, which the Klingon's managed to get their hands on because I was to get the Bird of Prey from uh well, they both had Bird of Praise that could cloak, and the Star Trek University. Eventually the Federation picked it up as well. We could really really get into a full thing of us just talking about Star Trek and cloaking devices as it turns out. Yeah, No,

that's a cool, cool implementation. Another one, of course, the Predator being able to have that chameleon likability or I guess, I guess the halo armor. Yeah, there's of course the the Harry Potter invisibility. Yeah, the hay cloak with the Marauders invisibility cloaks. So yeah, we've we've got all these ideas about invisibility. It's of course been a popular concept

in fiction, whether it's fantasy or science fiction. In the world of science fiction, of course, we have to try and come up with a way of how would this work, how would we manage to make something invisible? And well, some people feel more obligated to do that than others. Well, yeah, because some people would argue that if you don't do it, you might as well call it science fantasy rather than

science fiction. But the the concept usually boils down to the idea of somehow manipulating light so that bends around an object and then continues on as if the object were not there. So from an outsider's perspective, it's just you know, emptiness or or whatever. It's whatever, see the starf behind you or the wallopping willow or whatever. It excellent, really well done. I was wondering where you're going to

go with the Harry Potter one exactly. So the interesting thing is that there are people who are really working on this technology. You guys out there have probably heard about variations on real world cloaking devices, and you may wonder, well, how is this even possibly attempted, and there are a lot of different approaches, but one emerging field that we

wanted to talk about is meta materials. Right, because with normal materials, perhaps obviously, normal materials do not bend light around them so that you can see what's on the other side when they're solid and opaque materials. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Even a even a transparent window is reflecting some light

back to you. Right. The idea of a meta material, at least in this particular implementation, because there's lots of different potential ways to use meta materials, is to bend electromagnetic radiation, in this case visible light around it so that we wouldn't see it. Now, we're not there yet, by the way, spoiler alert, Yes, um, we are working slowly towards it. But let's put down a good solid

definition of meta materials to kind of start the conversation off. Okay, so, first thing to keep in mind their artificial These are these are materials that are man made, and they are very different from natural materials because the properties that you would find in any natural material are largely dependent upon its chemical composition. So, for example, a bar of gold, a bar of gold has the weight, the color, the density, it has all of these things because of the nature

of the atoms of gold. Right. That's if it were a different material, it would have very different properties, even if you had it at the same physical dimensions, right and so, And even though okay, a bar of gold is also a man made object, you're rarely going to pull a large chunk of gold like that right straight out of the ground having minecraft or something without it having some kind of impurities that you would have to melt out or whatever it is that you do. But

basically it's all chemical exactly. Now, manty materials they get their properties not just from the kind of atoms or molecules that make up that mety material. In fact, the chemical composition doesn't really ultimately matters they structure exactly. It's it's how that material is physically constructed. And when we say physical structure, we're not talking about something you can

see on the macro level. We're talking this is micro to nano exactly, to the point where it's so small that an optical microscope would not be able to show you what that structure is. And a lot of this was sort of theoretical. We'll talk about the history of it until relatively recently, we've just now started to get too sophisticated manufacturing processes that allow us to build these super tiny structures that will affect uh well, that will

interact with electromagnetic radiation and interesting ways. Right. It's sort of similar to the way that we've talked about nanostructures having different effects on the world around them, then we would normally be able to observe larger structures. Meta materials are similar and a lot of them will interact specifically

with electromagnetic radiation in very interesting ways. So if you look at electromagnetic radiation, if you were to to just be able to stop the whole universe and just look at a specific wave of electromagnetic radiation and be able to break that apart, conceptually, you'd be able to see that there are two major components of it, which are electric fields and magnetic fields. Um, there's also the vector,

which is the wave's magnitude and direction. So all three of these things together determine how they interact with any given I reject exactly, and so conventional material usually only

in acts with the electric fields. Usually there are some that interact with magnetic fields, but Generally speaking, the electric fields are what are interacting with conventional material Many materials can also interact with the magnetic fields, which increases the number of ways it can interact with any given electromagnetic radiation. Keep in mind, visible light is electromagnetic radiation. It's part

of that spectrum. It's a very narrow part of that spectrum, which also includes things like ultraviolet light and infrared light, but also microwaves and radio waves. Um. So this is the stuff that would, at least in theory, if we were able to build the right kinds of structures, allow us to create an invisibility cloak for real zes or at least some sort of of physical object that light would bend around so you would not be able to see it. And right now we only have invisibility cloaks

that bend microwaves around. The implementations tend to be very specific to very narrow bands in that spectrum, right and we'll talk about it. This has to do with the specific micro and nanostructures of these objects, which we'll get into in a moment um. But while we're talking about waves, electromagnetic waves are not the only ones that hypothetically these materials can interact with right, absolutely, anything that travels in wave form can in theory be uh something that interacts

in a different way with a meta material. So seismic waves, earthquakes, that those it travels in waves, just like you know, it's hard for us to imagine in a way things

like electromagnetic radiation because we can't directly see those waves. Um, we also can't well, I guess we can see earthquakes, or we can see the effective earthquakes, right, we can certainly feel them, certainly, So those those seismic waves that travel through the ground, you could in theory create a meta material that allows that stuff to just passed through it as if it weren't it wasn't there, and then imagine making a building out of that stuff. It wouldn't

even sway when the earthquake moves through. The earthquake would just pass through it as if it weren't there. It would just redirect. Yeah, it's the same thing with sound waves. You could build I mean, I'm I'm picturing our sound studio right now without all of this albeit lovely foam that that Noll has put up on our walls. Instead of that, the walls themselves could just be made of a material that redirects the sound waves. They could either absorb it or because again it all depends upon the

physical structure of the material itself. If you were able to do that, you could have a perfectly soundproofed room, so you would never have to worry about any sort of bleed out either going out of the room or coming into the room. And we would really like that because often we have to stop when there's a siren or a drag race or something going on outside, so that you guys, I mean, I'm sure a couple of them have snuck through anyway, but we try to limit

them also at will. Waves like ocean waves, those are another form that I've seen. I've seen the Navy looking into a strategy where they would have a special meta material on the outside of the whole of ships to make them more efficient in moving through the water, exactly releasing all that drags so that you don't have to worry about that. It doesn't have to do as much work to move a huge vessel through the water because

you have redirected the waves as if you're not there. Also, you could in theory, reduce the wake of a vehicle moving through the water, so that the ocean itself does not reveal the fact that an enormous like aircraft carrier just bustled through. You wouldn't have a wake, it would This to me is hard to imagine. It's hard for me to imagine. Yeah, going all, you know, Scutty said you cannot break the laws of physics, and I think I think it was a little shortsighted. Actually, I think

mento materials kind of prove them wrong. But I mean, clearly we're still working within the laws of physics. It's just we're expanding our our knowledge of how they how they work. We're just tweaking them a little bit, you know, kind of you know, just a little thumb of the nose at the laws of physics. So, alright, what is actually going on here? How you know, we've talked about what they are and what they do in general, and we've talked about this structure issue. But let's let's get

down into it. Yeah, So, if you were able to shrink down to a teeny tiny size and observe this material on the nano scale, what you would notice is that the actual physical structure of that material would be made up of repeated patterns. They would be kind of like a repeated scaffolding in a way. And think, again, this is on the nano scale. You to to us on the macro scale, it would just look like stuff.

Whatever it happened to be made out of. We went notice that structure because it's far too too tiny for us to see. But you would see these repeated patterns, and those repeated patterns would be specific to whatever wave it was supposed to interact with. Because here's the thing. For meta materials to be effective, generally speaking, those structures need to be smaller than whatever the wavelength is of

the whatever it's going to interact with. Right. This is why we've had better success with microwaves than anything else, because microwaves are very long wavelength as well, I mean compared to light. Absolutely. If for red's the same way and for red is a longer wavelength and say red, Yeah, so you run into a building problem, just just a structural issue here. Exactly how do you build something tiny

enough to interact with these very tiny wavelengths? Yeah, so in order for you to have something that would be able to shield an object from visible light, you would have to make uh structures with such precision that those repeating patterns would be just teeny teeny tiny, like yeah, as building blocks would have to be like no bigger than ten to twenty nanometers. Yeah, that's really super small.

And we've managed to do that kind of thing with microprocessors, but we're talking about expanding that out potentially to a three dimensional object. Ultimately, when you're looking at microprocessors, you're really talking about two dimensions. You're talking about the height and the width. There's no real Yeah, it's to the point where you might as well say it's two dimensional.

So when you're talking about three dimensional object and building that outward volumetrically, especially to cover say a car or yeah, oh yeah, or an aircraft carrier or whatever. Obviously the military carrier whatever, the military applications for this are obvious, right, I mean any kind of cloaking device. So yeah, being able to manufacture that out in a way that it

has a practical effect is an enormous undertaking. It's something that is, uh, we're years beyond that, like or no, that's years beyond us, I should say we we and it not close together. As my point, we're kind of shouting at each other exactly through the future exactly, so although we can't see them because when they're in the future in two they're invisible. But uh yeah, that's the thing is that you have to have these super super small,

small small structures. And not only that, but visible light takes up a spectrum. You know, we say the visible spectrum, and you know the easy way of saying that as the Roy G. Biv Right, You've got from red on one end to violet on the other end, and that and everything in between. And that's what makes a visible light for us. Well, in order to be able to shield something from visible light, you would have to somehow engineer a meta material that would be effective for that

entire range of those wavelengths. That's really tricky. It's one thing to design a meta material that works for a narrow range of wavelengths. That is, it's I hesitate to use the word easier. It's more realistic than effect creating a material that would be effective across an entire spectrum of wavelengths. So it may be that we never get to a point where, using meta materials we create a cloaking device that's effective for visible light. That doesn't mean

we won't create cloaking devices. We may do it through a totally different technology, or we may have cloaking devices that are cloaking devices for specific wavelengths like microwaves, because radar uses microwaves. Right, So, a stealth bomber that has meta material surfaces which means that the radar waves will go straight through it and not bounce back, you wouldn't have to have those super funky uh the panels that are all at weird angles. Yeah, that whole episode right right.

The surface of stealth bombers right now operate by redirecting those waves exactly. It's kind of like the idea of just uh, deflecting the wave to some other direction ap from the receiving station. Right. So, as long as the receiving station never gets the waves back, it doesn't know that there's an object. So you can you could go on and make those things more aerodynamic at that point, yeah, you could. You could completely redesign the self the weird

bulky looking thing. Yeah, I mean sure they were ridiculously expensive and inefficient ultimately, but hey, they look cool. I also like the Deloreans, so same. I mean, Deloreans show up on radar like crazy, but that's that's that's another episode. Now, there are different types of meta materials. There's there are different ways of building meta materials to interact with various

types of wave links. So I'm going to go ahead and preface this part of the podcast by saying, neither of us are physicists, and electromagnetic radiation is a difficult topic to wrap your head around when you haven't had that as as your continual background for say thirty years. Yeah. So if there are any physicists out there who cringe as we start to oversimplify what's happening, I apologize to you. Now. I am doing the best of my ability to explain

what's going on. Yes, and if we get anything wrong, please do be gentle with us, but let us know, Yes, please do, because then we can always do a follow up and say, you know what, we were doing this based on our understanding, and as it turns out, our understanding was flawed, and here's how it really works. We

appreciate that. Yes, please be gentle. Alright, So starting off, we have the electro magnetic band gap meta materials or also known as e b M meta materials or just a b M, because that's what the m stands for So these manipulate light propagation, and they are either made from left handed materials or photonic crystals left handed materials. That means they're more creative, it means they're sinister. So when you go to the old French being a left hander,

I consider myself sinister. Now, left handedness and electromagnetic radiation is um a very particular thing and you've got to be careful on how you define it. So with electromagnetic radiation, like we said earlier, you've got the electric field, the magnetic field, and the wave vector, which is that magnitude and direction combo. Right, So you also have physical material.

So any given physical material has a couple of different features, one called permitivity and one called permeability, and those are the ways in which it's going to interact with any given wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. Right, Yeah, Because your permitivity is how it interacts with electric fields. Your permeability is how it interacts with magnetic fields. And a positive number essentially says that it has this kind of interaction. But

here's the thing you can actually have. You can create a material that has negative permitivity and negative permeability. You won't find it in the nature, or at least we haven't found anything in nature so far that has both negative permeability and permitivity simultaneously. We have made stuff that does, and that stuff is called left handed yes and h. So it's really interesting concept that you are able to

create something that has this negative permitivity and permeability. What it ultimately means is that you could create a material that resists waves as they impact that material. So imagine creating a military vehicle out of this stuff and there's an electromagnetic burst. This thing would actually effectively the material itself would push back against that oncoming electromagnetic wave, leaving

the vehicle fine. So you could imagine that being really effective for something like an electromagnetic pulse weapon that wipes out electronics. Otherwise, if you're if you have it shielded with this stuff, it's like the ultimate Faraday cage. Yeah, it's like a field almost, but it's because of again the physical structure of the structure of the material. Yeah, there's there's no energy thing going on here. It has nothing to do like you don't have to turn off,

switch off exactly. It's just the way the stuff is physically built. It's it's unbelievable to me. It's amazing to me that just by uh, specifically designing the structure, you can dictate how electromagnetic radiation is going to interact with something. And now there's also single negative meta materials, which would have one of those two things, primitivity or permeability, be negative,

but the other one would be positive. Then you have natural materials that have like the double positive, which means the permitivity and permit permeability are both positive. You can make meta materials that have that same stuff. Uh, I mean, it all depends on what you want the meta material to do obviously. Uh. Then there are others that get restively more difficult for me to describe. So I'm not gonna try because I know at that point I would

just be giving misinformation. But uh, that's the basic ideas, the the idea of interacting with either the electric field or the magnetic field or both in a way that's different from your general natural materials out there. So this all sounds like incredible science fiction technology to me. This is all probably really recent research, right, Well, how about late nineteenth century is that still recent? I mean, overall from a geological time scale, it's like no time at

all has passed, but for for humans. Yeah, this this is actually the whole concept is built upon observations that were starting to come out of the scientific world in the late nineteenth century. Back in a scientist named Jagaudie chunder Bows experimented with microwaves and twisted structures that today we would call artificial chirals. Chiral, by the way, is essentially an asymmetric shape. It's one that if you were to superimpose a reverse of its image, it would not

fit onto itself. Um. He found that by introducing randomly oriented wire helisses as in the plural of helix uh in a host medium, he could create a microwave lens. Essentially, he was bombarding stuff with microwaves and he had these little wire helix structures embedded into that material, and then he would move the little helix helis sees around, changing their orientation, changing their their layout, and he discovered that

that was changing the the effect of those microwaves. He could focus it exactly, so he's like, huh, something to do with the physical structure is affecting the way the microwaves are behaving with this material, and that was the very beginning. Some say, because there are people who argue about whether or not this is in fact the origin.

But by the nineteen sixties you had scientists hypothesizing that if we were in fact able to build stuff with incredible nano precision, we could do so and make it so that it behaves in a specific way when introduced to electromagnetic radiation. There wasn't any way we could actually do it at that time. Yeah, we wouldn't actually get

into that kind of production technology until the nineteen nineties. Yeah, And in fact, really it wasn't until the two thousands that you started seeing the first real forays into the microwave world, where we were trying to uh specifically create a meta material that would allow microwaves to pass straight through it as if nothing were there at all, and kind of around it. But yeah, kind of around it. Yeah.

When I say through it, over it, I guess technically, yeah, imagine that the light like think of it almost like water, you know how water. If you put a stone in an in flowing water, the water will just flow around the stone and then continue on as if nothing were there. It's the same sort of things. In this case, we're talking about light. It actually bends around the object and then continues on not to us, it's as if light is just passing straight through it, right, That's that's an

optical illusion. So if we were able to see in microwaves, we would not see that object. It would just be as if there was nothing there at all. So that was, you know, kind of the beginning of it. But as far as where we are now, we're really seeing lots of effort going into making this technology more sophisticated. Uh, And we're able to create much more precise meta materials than we ever have been before. Oh yeah, A lot of that has to do with three D printing. Talk

about that a lot on this show. We do. Uh. For example, that microwave invisibility click that we were that we've been talking about involved printing wires and patterns on too circuit boards in order to create this this shield. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool. So this whole microwave shield thing, it's obviously the best example because those are the ones that have had the most experimentation, the than the greatest success rate so far. Again, it tends to be narrow bands

of the spectrum. It's not like it will affect every wave length, but it has shown that this could be possibly used for stealth technology, like or if you want to turn it on its head, you could actually make more effective antennas using meta materials. Right, instead of it being something that that the waves passed through, it could be something that is channeling those waves more effectively, either to transmit or to receive, whether it's microwaves or whatever.

In fact, I've even seen talk about optical antenna's, So it would be something in the light range, not necessarily visible light, but in the light range that would be really effective at transmitting and receiving because the meta materials themselves were channel ling that radiation in a more effective manner um. Again, we're getting to a point now where I'm like, I understand the application, Understanding the mechanism is

getting more and more complex. And then there's the idea of creating like an amazing microscope or telescope using meta materials to create super lenses. So here's here's the thing. When we talk about the nanoscale, and we talked about not being able to see something with an optical microscope, the main reason we talk about that is that you're talking about trying to look at things that are on a scale that's smaller than a light wavelength. So here's

the weird part in theory. You could use meta materials that have a negative refraction index refraction. When when you're talking about lenses, there's a thing called the diffraction limit, and it's one of those things that like, the better or lenses, the less problem you have with diffraction, but ultimately you're going to run into it at some point or another. The menty materials can start to make that

less and less of a factor. So as you have this negative refraction index, which would allow you to look at stuff that normally would be too small for you to see whether that is a distant star. So you're talking about a telescope in that case, or something on the nanoscale, so you're talking about a microscope on that case. And the the idea here is that, Okay, lenses focus light by bending it right, UM, and the refraction index measures how much a given material will bend the light

passing through it. Uh, you know, the way that an object will look different when you view it through water or through a wine glass or something like that. UM and a negative refractive index means that the material is bending light the wrong way, which could allow for this very precise fine focus. Um, but it kind of goes against just again your common sense of how things work, right, because you're saying, oh, well, this just does it the opposite way. But but that's that's the thing at all.

That's like saying if I jumped into water, I would get more dry. Like it's something that goes so against what are common experiences. It's hard, at least for me to imagine it. It's difficult for me to have a concept of how that works. But it does. But it does, and it could be useful for a number of technologies because a number of technologies in fact, to use optics, how about fiber optic cables or optical discs like DVDs.

H that this kind of research could lead to huge improvements in a DVD's data capacity or in fiber optic cable transmission speed or power consumption. So one of the things that I talked about on a forward Thinking episode an upcoming forward thinking episode spoiler alert, folks, is the whole field of photonics. The idea of creating electronic components

that are based on light rather than on electricity. So the thing about photonics is that they tend that they're incredibly fast, Like you can move a lot of data at the speed of light. So when I say fast, I'm not just talking about transmission speed, because really we're talking at this point transmission speeds that are close to the speed of light. I'm talking about how much information you can move through that channel at once. So throughput

is probably a better word than speed. But the problem is, especially when you get into things like quantum computers, you're limited by how far you can you can extend these systems. You would not be able to create at this moment with our technology right now, a an internet based on quantum computers. It wouldn't reach far enough for you to be able to do that. I think thirty kilometers is

about the limit that you can get. And while we could in theory build out a network that has a density for that, when you're getting to places that are you know, further out, Yeah, it's make working from Antarctica really difficult, right but by using meta materials and improving fiber optic technology, we might be able to address some of those issues and be able to extend that kind

of of utility. Further, so then we are able to have these massive nate you know, networks of fiber optics that don't have any data loss issues or at least fewer data loss issues, and be able to put everyone on this incredible speed, and then we don't have to worry about the whole net neutrality thing anymore. I'm dreaming, I know, but still it's pretty cool. It's a beautiful dream.

And besides fiber optics and DVDs, we could also see this helping improve technologies like ultrasonic technologies, anything that again involves waves, so sound ultrasonic obviously the whole sound profing idea, who stick shielding that kind of thing. Also, uh, you know solar panels again you want to redirect that light. So these are really cool potential applications of meta materials, assuming that we get to a point where we can produce them. Yeah, right, um, they could be the next

evolution of ultra light objects. We were just talking about that in our camping episode. I mean, although this would probably be a little bit of the price point of many people are looking for hobbyist camping for a mere three million dollars. Uh m, I t and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working on three D printing stuff

that has super low density and super high stiffness and strength. Um. For example, they can print these tiny lattices of polymers and then coat those lattices with thin films of metal materials, metal or ceramics or something like that, and then melt out the original polymer, leaving these little, tiny, bitty hollow tubes with walls you know, only like fifty to animeters thick, that are incredibly strong, like able to bear loads that are at least a hundred and sixty thousand times their

own weight. Again, hard to conceive, It's hard for me to imagine. Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Southampton have been working with materials that will adhere to a surface when that material is exposed to light. What. Yeah, So imagine that you've got a wall, maybe it's made out usually you're talking about a dielectric wall, so something that

can conduct electricity. So like, let's say that it's a stainless steel wall or some sort um, and you put this thing whatever it happens to be against that wall, and as long as it is being stimulated by light, it sticks there, and if you were to take away the light source, it would no longer stick there. And it's because it's a meta material that has these little vibrating electrons sites that would interact with electrons that are on the surface of the wall. It's health so it's

an electron electron interaction that doesn't involve repulsion. And that's as much as I can tell you, folks, because I mean, once I started looking into it more, I was like, Okay, I'm gonna have to take a full course in physics for me to really understand what's going on on a physical level. But the cool part is that this could potentially become a new way of developing brand new technologies that we can't even really conceive right now. Yeah, that's

kind of a new fundamental force. Yeah, it's essentially the discovering that wait a minute, there's something else that that can happen with under these specific circumstances that we didn't know about, and it is a fundamental force, which is incredible. I mean it, this is an amazing scientific discovery. So even if there's never like a practical application, just knowing that this is another way that our universe works is

a valuable lesson. Oh of course. Um. Meanwhile, over at the University of Texas at Austin, they've been working on creating these meta material mirrors that are only foim, they're thick that can double the frequency of infrared radiation that hits it. Okay, So if the incoming radiation has just, for example, a wavelength of eight micrometers um, the outgoing reflection will have a wavelength of for micrometers um, which

is a pretty awesome feature. But the researchers are also saying that they can possibly fine tune the structure to adjust the reflection to other desired wavelengths um. The mirror is made of a bunch of wacky stuff, including indium, gallium, arsenic, aluminum, and gold. But that's a little bit beside the point I just found. I was like, arsenic is in there. That's cool, and how I deal with That's what? That all? Right? Um?

But but so you know, being able to convert the frequency of wavelengths at will would be incredibly awesome for a bunch of different optical purposes, like miniaturizing laser systems or improving optic space sensory tech. Yeah. Yeah, In fact, I've I've seen a lot about meta materials used to help create these manature laser systems, and you might think, well, what's that good for. We'll go back to that photonics discussion we had just a moment ago that would be necessary.

If you want to have a microchip that is working under photonics and not just electricity, then you have to have these lasers that generate the light and by manatorizing it, that's what makes it possible. Otherwise, you know your components are going to be larger, which means your devices have to be larger in order to take advantage of that

photonics technology. So this is really promising. Then you have this This was again one of those things where I read it and I thought, what some folks at Northwestern University, some scientists have been working on a material that would act the opposite way you would expect it to based

upon our experience with the world around us. So imagine you've got a cushion, and when you sit on that cushion, instead of sinking down into the cushion as you would with any normal cushion, the cushion pushes back against you and actually rises up. Or imagine that you've got some sort of silly putty. But instead of when you pull on the silly putty and it stretches way out, it starts to compress as you pull on it. In other words,

it sounds like we're talking about Harry Potter again. It is physically behaving the opposite of what it should if it were just a decent, law abiding material. And here's the crazy thing is that they're scientists who are working on creating material that does this stuff. Essentially, when you when you pull it, it compresses and when you compress

it it expands. And they said that the way they did it because normally, if you made a material like this that could do this, it would be very unstable and it would collapse in on a more stable, uh structure. That what they did was they started by creating a stable structure that already did this, so when it collapses, it's collapsing into the the base form of this so that when you pull on it, it compresses. And uh. They explained the concept because again they're they're working on this.

It's not like they have big old piles of this flubber like stuff out there. They're working on it, and it's very much in the hypothetical phase. They described it by by describing, uh, four atoms that are in a horizontal line and uh, and trying to pull those atoms apart would would cause them to compress closer together. That illustration didn't help me at all. But that's not due to them. That's because I'm dense. So I'm not blaming it on you, Northwestern University. I'm blaming it upon my

own limitations. But I think, what again, just by making this material a specific structure, it has these very different properties. Yeah, I think that part of this is so hard to wrap our minds around because it's i mean, not only is it breaking the laws of physics kind of sort

of um, but also because it's also new. Um that there was a market research company called BCC Research that just this year estimated that the global market for mety materials is going to expand from like two eighty nine million dollars in to some one point two billion by nineteen. So because the future is bright, it's hypothetically picking up and it's it's the future is not just bright, it's invisible.

But but to be to be fair, to be fair, this this proves, like you say, two million dollars, which, don't get us wrong, that's a lot of money. We're not saying it's a little money. If you think it's a little money, give us two million dollars. But it's a drop in the bucket compared to other industries. It's really proving that mety materials are in their infancy. So yeah, well it's it's incredible to think of the sort of applications that could potentially come out of this. I mean,

imagine a city that's earthquake proof. That or a bridge that really is earthquake proof that the earth is shaking around it and the bridge is just fine. That's it's it's it blows my mind. It's incredible. I would like that future. It would be an awesome future, be fantastic. So we're really excited to see where meta materials go.

We're really excited that again, this is properties that are just based upon the physical structure of that material, has nothing to do with like, hey, we we managed to make this new you know, stuff that is really unstable and decays almost immediately. So that's unfortunate, but look at the cool thing it does for the split second it exists. That's not what we're talking about. This is stuff that has permanency because again it's just the physical structure at

that nano level that gives it that ability. Wow. All right, Well, now that we have melted our brains and hopefully stimulated your brains, I would like to invite all of you guys to suggest any topics you might want to hear about in the future. Maybe you said that was really interesting, Can we talk about something like really simple? Now? Maybe maybe the technology often Kitten's kitten technology. Obviously that would

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