Winds of Change.NET: "Transparent Aluminum" & Anti-Matter

September 20, 2002

"Transparent Aluminum" & Anti-Matter

by Joe Katzman at September 20, 2002 9:24 AM

"Let's see. Successful force field protection tests. Anti-gravity. And don't even get me started on Warp Drive. Now, like some eerie clip from Star Trek IV, comes "transparent alumninum". For real (article | picture)."

What's wrong with this picture? Reader Brian Erst wrote to note that:

"Alumina is aluminum oxide, the same stuff sapphires and rubies are made of. Pure alumina is always transparent - if you've ever had a watch with a "sapphire crystal" scratch-resistant pane, you've already seen "transparent alumina". It IS very hard (hence the scratch resistance) and clear, but it's also not a big discovery. Fraunhofer simply invented a better manufacturing technique."

Not at all the same thing as "transparent aluminum," he says. Materials engineer John B. Woodford was also paying close attention:

"They're working with alumina - aluminum oxide, Al₂O₃ - and transparent aluminum oxide (single-crystal sapphire, frex) is nothing new. Their breakthrough is making an extremely fine-grained, low defect density, polycrystalline aluminum oxide powder compact with high transparency. Normally, polycrystalline aluminum oxide with larger grains is translucent at best, and sintered powder compacts tend to be weak due to a high number of defects (pores, microcracks, etc.)... The new stuff is a definite improvement, but there's no new science here - it's just an application of submicron powder generation."

One important Way to Wisdom is admitting mistakes quickly. Now we know, thanks to my esteemed readers.

Meanwhile, in other "Star Trek Science" news, we have baby steps toward 2 more Trek tools: medical tricorders, and anti-matter.

The "tricorders" are in very early stages, but there's no question that the show's ideas are serving as inspiration. The CERN anti-matter experiments, meanwhile, go back to fundamental theories of physics for their inspiration rather than a T.V. show. The news item notes that even the limited results claimed for anti-hydrogen production are in dispute, but the details are interesting nonetheless.

We won't see anti-matter starship engines any time soon - making antiprotons currently requires 10 billion times more energy than it produces. But if they really produced anti-hydrogen, then the scientific questions will begin to fall away soon... and that's where things get interesting. Once anti-matter's properties and uses are more exactly known, doing useful things with it becomes less of a science question, and more of an engineering question.

At which point, Harrow's Rapidly Changing Face of Technology could hold a whole new set of suprises for us all.

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