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"If I had to get a new Ph.D. now, I'd get it in polymer engineering - the manipulation of matter."
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The key engineering feat of this novel requires an extremely light material with great tensile strength. Clarke comes up with a carbon-based material.
This sounds very much like a nanotube:
Strictly speaking, any tube with nanoscale dimensions, but generally used to refer to carbon nanotubes, which are sheets of graphite rolled up to make a tube. A commonly mentioned non-carbon variety is made of boron nitride, another is silicon. These noncarbon nanotubes are most often referred to as nanowires. The dimensions are variable (down to 0.4 nm in diameter) and you can also get nanotubes within nanotubes, leading to a distinction between multi-walled and single-walled nanotubes. Apart from remarkable tensile strength, nanotubes exhibit varying electrical properties (depending on the way the graphite structure spirals around the tube, and other factors, such as doping), and can be superconducting, insulating, semiconducting or conducting (metallic).
Nanotubes can be either electrically conductive or semiconductive, depending on their helicity, leading to nanoscale wires and electrical components. These one-dimensional fibers exhibit electrical conductivity as high as copper, thermal conductivity as high as diamond, strength 100 times greater than steel at one sixth the weight, and high strain to failure.
A nanotube's chiral angle--the angle between the axis of its hexagonal pattern and the axis of the tube--determines whether the tube is metallic or semiconducting.
Apparently, nanotube crystals were observed as early as 1952 by Soviet scientists, but the papers were only available in Russian. Another paper was published in 1970, but I don't think that their properties were explored until after Clarke wrote his book.
Read more about nanotubes and buckyballs.
Consider also an earlier application of a similar idea - the Sinclair molecule chain from a 1968 Larry Niven story. Comment/Join this discussion ( 1 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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