Transparent Aluminum a Reality

TuballoyThunder writes "Many of us remember the scene from Star Trek IV where Scotty barters the formula for transparent aluminum for a small run. It now appears that we can now add transparent aluminum to the science fact column."

hmm

[Gronkers]

Now if we could only arm our military vehicles with convential armor let alone the nifty new stuff..

IPOD nano needs this stuff

[blackomegax]

seriously. give the nano a nice coat of this and i think apple's little scratching post will turn into something nice and...well...scratchless

Humvee Windshields

[deathcow]

IIRC the windshield of a Humveee is about 72" x 23"... thats 1656 square inches. The article quotes $10 - $15 a sq. inch, so the windshield would be worth $16,560 to $24,840.... I guess they wont be protecting fleets of vehicles with them?

Re:Super Polish

[Anonymous Coward]

Polishing (like case hardening) belongs to a normal metallic property called work hardening. You work a metal it will become harder (but normally also more brittle). In fact it is rarer to have a metal that won't work harden than not. Time to go back to metal shop!!

Re:Ooooh.

[MavEtJu]

Say goodbye to broken windows from baseballs,

And say hello to the fire from which you can't escape from because the "glass" is unbreakable.

Every advantage has its disadvantage!

Unintended joke?

[Rocketship Underpant]

"...loose your apetite before you even unwrap it!"

I guess if you loosed your appetite on an unwrapped sandwich, you'd end up eating the whole thing wrapper and all! An amusing picture, even if you meant to type "lose" and suggest the opposite. :)

Actually this is a ceramic - nothing really new

[spineboy]

Aluminum has been used in ceramics for many years, and is a very common substance in many transparent products such as gems (rubys, emeralds, etc)! This is really nothing new about aluminum, but news in that this is a really tough!! bullet-proof glass, able to withstand multiple! rounds from 30 cal armor peircing bullets and 50 cal sniper rounds. Typical body armor is good for one! shot from a high power slug because it shatters.

Expect to see this to enter the consumer market for things like - IPod nano screens, watch faces, scratch reistant coverings on eyeglasses,etc. The expensive weapons grade version is supposedly not much diferent from the much cheaper non-weapons grade version, so expect the $10-$/sq inch!!! price to vastly drop. I give it one year before we start to commonly see this in the high cost items at first (Rolex and Tag watches, etc)

Re:Super Polish

[TeknoHog]

Actually, strength from polishing is a pretty basic idea in material science. It comes down to the fact that materials break due to initial cracks that grow bigger under stress. If the cracks are initially larger, the material is more fragile.

For example, a glass bottle can be broken by putting a little sand into it and shaking vigorously. It's mainly the scraping action, not the weight of the sand, that causes the glass to break.

Re:Ooooh.

[Julian Morrison]

Yeuch. You disgust me! How brainwashed and nihilistic does a human have to be, to strap a gun pointing to their head with a dangling tag saying "for police use"? Or, how utterly sick, to insist others do so?

I do not view the government as a thing with the legitimate right to kill me. If that stymies their plans, fuck 'em. I'll take all the armor I can get!

Re:Humvee Windshields

[Kaenneth]

Cheaper than training a replacement soldier.

Re:See-through cans?

[6th time lucky]

bugger it, i was going to mod in this discussion, but i have to respond...

3 - How impressive would it really be to crush a see-through ARMOUR PLATED, BULLET PROOF can on your forehead?

...pretty impressive i would have to say.

Re:hmm

[rtb61]

Interesting idea that one, now if you consider the original humvee as a general transport vehicle admittedly a hugely expensive piece of gas guzzling pork and the armoring it for yet another rather cunning and expensive piece of additional pork. Stop and think about all those existing armored cars which where in fact designed to do that job (still far more effectively armored) and those cheap fuel efficient jeeps that used to used to provide general non-combat transport. Of course soldiers are cheaper and they don't generate a profit, like the continual replacement of a sort of armoured car rather than the survivability an actual armoured car (sarcasm folks, I used to be one).

Back to the story, will vivendi universal claim the idea of transparent aluminium and sue for patent rights, hmm?

Re:Unintended joke?

[somersault]

it's crazy how many people use loose instead of lose though. All those lil kids and wikipedians online these days are so impressionable you know, and the more instances that slide through, the more the problem will propagate. Capital punishment seems to be the way to go.

Re:Aluminium!

[ricky-road-flats]

Interestingly (or not, as the case may be) the discoverer of "aluminium" decided to call it "aluminum" but the British Chemical Naming Commission (or whatever they're called) insisted that all metals end in "ium" so they overrode him.

Speaking as an Englishman myself, that makes sense. So what's going on with platinum then, apart from the fact that 'platinium' sounds lame...

Re:The article is disappointing

[grimJester]

Omg, even the jokes are dupes [slashdot.org]!

Re:Aluminium Reality or Aluminum Realty?

[MightyYar]

Here's the funny thing about language - it changes. Sometimes for a good reason, sometimes for a bad reason. Resisting that will doom you to a life of, well, posting frustrated comments on slashdot complaining about how people spell aluminum. In particular, this "mispronunciation" is about 100 years old, and no amount of slashdot posting is going to change that. Move on.

Factual error in story

[ari_j]

Scotty didn't exchange the formula for a small run of transparent aluminum. The exchange was the formula for a run of plexiglass panels. You are hereby ordered to watch Star Trek IV three times before Sunday.

Re:Aluminium!

[MightyYar]

You know your post on slashdot is uninformative if you can be replaced by a bot:

psuedocode:

do while true
if slashdot post contains "aluminum","color","honor"
post message subject = "aluminium", "colour", "honour" body = "Grr..."
endif
end while

Al.u.min.i.um or A.lu.mi.num?

[Stunning Tard]

I know somebody who has a hard time pronouncing the North American version of this (being from NA). It's always comes out 'A.lu.ni.um' on them. It's a real speech impediment which they don't like showcasing. So I encourage them to say it the British way because it's like saying an entirely different word which gets around the bad wiring that has burned A.lu.ni.um into their head.

So I don't see a great need to pick one pronunciation. It's not like we need to communicate to get along and not start wars or anything. Sometimes I'll watch Coronation Street just to laugh at the incomprehensible characters. Namely that chubby lady who sold the kid's dog to buy boots. Har! great stuff!

In the case of transparent alumin[...] I remember Scotty saying it the North American way despite being a Scotsman. So there's your proof right there. In the future the NA version wins out as the new standard. If you think I'm being silly to base knowledge of the future on STAR TREK just where do you think the formula for this stuff came from?

Re:Bad Trek Trivia

[flyingsquid]

Scotty doesn't trade the formula for transparent aluminium for a small run of the stuff. He trades for a quantity of perspex.

OK, but WHY did they have to get perspex? Why not just get, oh, I don't know, REGULAR ALUMINUM? Or plate steel, which would be even thinner and cheaper than either? They go through this huge effort of screwing around with the space-time continuum and everything to get something transparent, but apparently nobody has even considered the possibility of making the tank, I dunno, NON-TRANSPARENT!? Or maybe with just a couple little viewing windows? If the tank is opaque, are the whales really going to freak out any more than they already do after being transported into the belly of freakin' Klingon attack ship???

Sorry to go ballistic. I mean, I did enjoy the movie, but that part has always bugged me. Damn it, it's so... well, illogical.

Re:Dude, 'Aluminium' *is* the correct one.

[MightyYar]

It IS deviant. But so is every word in the English language - that's how languages form. English is the bastardization of, what, some Germanic language? Throw in some Romance languages for good measure? Should we all be speaking "Grunt", the one true language, spoken properly by our Chimp forefathers?

Since you mentioned it, I went to the IUPAC website and searched for "Aluminum". You know what came up? Hundreds of IUPAC journals with the word spelled that way. Clearly they don't find it mangled or deviant enough to edit in their publications. Dude.

Re:A small run?

[irving47]

He did. The big piece of plexi, and the use of the Plexicorp helicopter. Lots of people assumed it was transparent aluminum because they weren't listening to Dr. Nichols when he said, "It'd take years just to figure out the dynamics of these matrices..."

Ugh. I shouldn't have known that part verbatim.

Re:Unintended joke?

[Dwonis]

Beekuzitt mayckes iht diphihcullttu umderztand ezpechilley for none naytiv riedres.

Standards compliance

[SkippyTPE]

It's amazing to me how many in the Slashdot crowd will jump up and down screaming about standards compliance until it comes to written English, whereupon the rules (i.e. - standards) are apparently taken as meaningless.

Re:You joke, but...

[russotto]

A transparent ceramic that's lighter and stronger than glass and the various plastics now used, and you think it doesn't have a practical application? It doesn't even take much of an imagination to find tons. Armor, obviously. Better windows on aircraft and spacecraft (where weight matters much more than on a ground vehicle). Child-proof computer monitors (OK, that one's a stretch...)

Re:Unintended joke?

[IbeUID0]

It may very well beg the question. It is not misusing language. The definition of "begs the question" that you are using is a misuse of language - specifically a mistranslation of Aristotle that dates from the 16th century. So, you are defending a 500 year old mistake.

Congratulations. You have just won the "ironic idiot" award for this story for decrying something as a mistake using an argument that is, in fact, a mistake.

Re:Aluminium Reality or Aluminum Realty?

[mysticgoat]

When you can work out that a clause containing a transitive verb requires an object...you can criticise other people.

Sigh.

For about 250 years now, eddykatid idjits have been trying to convince the world that correct english grammar is the grammar of the dead latin language. They would try to surgically insert a skeleton into an octopus, then when the poor dead thing can't be posed in some natural way, they would assert that such a pose is in poor taste, and simply not done by the better octopusses. Gack.

English is not latin. True, there are some superficial resemblances, like the indisputable fact that in both, the spoken words are emitted from the caudal orifices of the speakers. But the concepts of "transitive verbs", "objects", "indirect objects", "clauses", and the like are ideas of latin that have been imposed upon english by people with small minds who can't accept that english grammar is a fuzzy thing. When they see other languages that have crystalline grammars with smashing hard facets and oh so sharp edges, they want english to be the same way.

Ya wanna larn to speke english right? Then realize that the game of english is the Calvin Ball of languages.

"Don't criticize what you can't understand" --B.D.

Re:Standards compliance

[NeMon'ess]

What do the Brits call the small lumps of dough or batter that bake up into what USians call biscuits?

Re:Aluminium Reality or Aluminum Realty?

[Guppy06]

"Yes, yes, I know, a whole continent of people can't spell that metal's name. It's just like the English who wrote "cocoa" when they should have written "cacao". Amazing how an illiterate in the wrong place at the wrong time can screw up a dictionary."

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

--Someone writing in perfect English.

Why transparent aluminum?

[Cunk]

Why did Scotty even need transparent aluminum? Plate steel makes a fine whale aquarium.

Re:Sapphire is transparent Aluminum

[CapnGib]

sure it is, in the same way water is liquid hydrogen