Dilithium vs. Lithium
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Vance, I'm very sorry, but that's bullshit. It really is.
Aluminum salts are not metals. Ceramics (with a primary metal component) are not metals.
What makes metals... "metallic"... is the fact that they have a very loose tie to their outer electrons. Put a bunch of metal atoms together, and they don't "react" (ie, they don't form covalent or ionic bonds) but rather, they end up blending their outer electrons into what is (somewhat colloquially stated, but effectively accurate nevertheless) an "electron sea." The outer electrons of the metal atoms become dissociated from their "home" atom and so you end up with the positively-charge atom, consisting of the nucleus and the inner layers of electrons (which remain tied to that nucleus) "floating" in that "sea" of loose electrons. The net charge is zero, of course.
This "detached electron" character is what makes metals be metals. This is what makes them so thermally, and electrically, conductive. This is what makes them malleable, yet strong. And this is what makes them opaque.
React your aluminum with something else... say, oxygen... and you end up with something which is no longer metallic. Just like if you react iron with something else (say, oxygen) you end up with iron oxide... aka "rust"... which is not a metal, either.
As a rule, transparent materials are either wholly amorphous (silicates which make up what we call "glass," for instance) or monocrystalline (such as your mom's "fine crystal" dinnerware.) Crystalline materials which are not monocrystalilne will generally still pass light through, but are more commonly seen as translucent rather than transparent. Why? Well... every crystalline grain boundary refracts light... lots of boundaries results in a huge number of refractions occurring inside of the material, so by the time the light comes out the opposite side of the material, it's been almost entirely scattered.
Now, metals also tend to be "crystalline" in a sense, but not in the same sense... the charged central "ions" of metal do tend to stack up in certain geometric ways, and you do have grain boundaries in metals (as a rule... there are some rather esoteric situations - if you're not into metallurgy, I mean - where this isn't the case, but not in "normal" states for metallic materials.)
So... you're saying you've seen an alloy which is "transparent aluminum?" Let's see it.
I suspect you're either talking about a new variation on aluminum-oxide-based ceramics which hit the market within the past... what, six or eight months, if memory serves?... or, you're talking about the "thin film metalization" of aluminum with sufficient porosity to permit it to be effectively transparent in very thin applications, which has been on the market for several years now. But maybe I'm wrong. So, let's hear it.
Sorry, Cary, but you're just plain wrong here. It's an alloy that uses alumina as a base. It's been around for a few years now (the scientific papers on it were actually why TVH really used it). I don't know much about the substance itself, as it's pretty beyond my interest, but I have seen the stuff.
Besides, is it sillier than inventing completely new physics for mundane items to reconsile an ill-thought-out part of dialog in an episode written before the writer's guide was complete?
Vance... ALUMINA IS A COMPOUND, NOT A METAL. "Alumina" is a term used to describe various oxides of aluminum. Alumina is found throughout nature... generally in an ore called "bauxite." In some cases, large crystals of alumina are found, and these are called "Sapphires." Do you think "sapphires" are also metal?
METALLIC ALLOYS CAN ONLY BE FORMED FROM METALS... not from compounds which happen to have a metal component in their covalent-bond matrix.
Yes, and "table salt" is an alloy of sodium, evidently. (sigh)
You are talking about a ceramic compound. Not a metal. Not an alloy. If you don't know the meaning of the terms, you should be cautious about pretending that you do.
I've seen transparent armor as well. And yes, there is (as I clearly stated) a CERAMIC MATERIAL, based upon aluminum, which is used as a "transparent armor" material. It's extremely hard, reasonably tough, and effectively transparent. BUT IT IS CERAMIC - think "a new form of glass" and you'll be on the right track.
The part about this that bugs me is that so many people, lacking in a basic technical background, believe that "transparent aluminum" is not only possible, but actually EXISTS, based upon some half-assed writing for a passable lightweight movie from a few years ago.Besides, is it sillier than inventing completely new physics for mundane items to reconsile an ill-thought-out part of dialog in an episode written before the writer's guide was complete?
Entertainment is just that... and yeah, that's what we're discussing here... but my point is that entertainment FAILS for me when they do something that is so obviously and overtly WRONG that it pulls me out of my ability to suspend my disbelief.
This was no less egregious than, say, the rotational-gravity debacle in "Armageddon." I think a few more people "got" what was wrong with Armageddon, though... because more people have twirled a weight on the end of a string, and less people have training in metallurgy (or even in basic chemistry, really).
Cary, the point I was making was that it made more sense to write off 'dlithium', like 'transparent aluminum' as a colloqualism. I mean, you kinda made the point yourself.. no one generally refers to 'salt' by its scientific nomenclature.. are we really going to assume that military men are ALWAYS going to do it?
And the "gamma/x-ray mirror" idea mentioned above is the only possible way that might make sense, so I think that's a decent discussion. However... as that discussion shows... these are compounds we already know about, and nomenclature we already know about, and the behavior of those materials seems not to lend itself to what we're discussing.
There's a reason that, in the show, they went from "lasers" to "phasers" and from "lithium" to "dilithium" and so forth. Why they invented metals like "castrodynium" and "duranium" and "tritanium" and so forth, instead of going with metals we already know. The reason is that they wanted to avoid having a situation where educated and informed people would end up saying "wait a minute, lasers can't do that!" and so forth.
So, they went with invented materials, and invented technologies, not based upon anything that really exists, so that the audience wouldn't end up noticing that something is wrong.
Trek ... CLASSIC trek... never really failed in that regard during the first two seasons. The only major failure in TOS, in this regard, was in "Spock's Brain," which I tend to disregard anyway... where "ion power" was tossed in, in a way which proved that the writer had no idea what he was talking about.
Keep it "plausible but unexplainable" and you don't pull your audience out of their reverie...
Huh? I don't have the vaguest idea what your "military men" line is supposed to mean... ???
One thing I think we can all agree on: dilithium is a terrible, terrible name.
So let's forget it, and discuss tricobalt.
So let's forget it, and discuss tricobalt.
JIHAD!!!!!!
Cary, how feasible is it for dilithium to be a superatom of lithium? Is it off the wall to imagine such a superatom forming a crystalline structure?
Well, it's not "off the wall" at all, based upon what little I know about superatoms.
Basically, the idea is that some materials, when vaporized, can form "clusters" with like atoms, with those clusters effectively behaving as a single atom. I think this is more common with light metals like sodium and yes, I think it could happen with lithium.
Since a basic tenet of "superatoms" as I understand them (and if someone knows more, please chime in... there is little "practical benefit" to this from a "real world engineering" perpspective, so I've never actually used "superatoms" and know about them only from a few technical pubs I've read) is that they inherently tend to have very loose outer electrons (making them behave like metals), then such "superatom" structures would behave very much like heavy metals in that regard.
All metals have "crystaline" structure, as I mentioned before, but it's a different sort of crystal than most people think of. A "superatom" crystal would be inherently opaque, just like a metal crystal is inherently opaque... even if the element being crystalized wasn't itself a metal. At least that's how I understand it... but I've never worked with these.
I'm interested that you're familiar with the topic... but then again, you're always up on some pretty fascinating stuff. Like I said, I know this only because I've read a couple of magazine articles (technical pubs) which briefly discuss it. I've never had any "real world" reason to learn about them. So... what brought this to your attention?
By the way, any word from what's going on at Ad Astra? I keep looking for updates on VASIMR, but I get the impression that they may be in "standstill" mode right now?
A little tidbit, of extremely limited importance: the prefixes used for predicted elements are eka, dvi, or tri, depending on how far below the discovered elements of the period the predicted element lies. So "eka-lithium"? (Well, more accurately, "dvi-francium."
) But hey, trilithium still kind of works!
Regarding a lithium superatom...
From what (even less) I know about superatoms, their electrons behave as if they were orbiting only one atom. If this is right, does this mean that, with a di prefix, the lithium superatom is 1)made of two lithium nuclei, 2)have 4 electrons in its outer shell?
And if this is correct, would the lithium superatom then behave like carbon? Is dilithium really lithium superatom diamond (or graphite, or fullerene, or aggregated nanorod, etc.)?
And if this is the case, can we actually ascribe any useful properties to it?
) But hey, trilithium still kind of works!Regarding a lithium superatom...
From what (even less) I know about superatoms, their electrons behave as if they were orbiting only one atom. If this is right, does this mean that, with a di prefix, the lithium superatom is 1)made of two lithium nuclei, 2)have 4 electrons in its outer shell?
And if this is correct, would the lithium superatom then behave like carbon? Is dilithium really lithium superatom diamond (or graphite, or fullerene, or aggregated nanorod, etc.)?
And if this is the case, can we actually ascribe any useful properties to it?
Regarding a lithium superatom...
From what (even less) I know about superatoms, their electrons behave as if they were orbiting only one atom. If this is right, does this mean that, with a di prefix, the lithium superatom is 1)made of two lithium nuclei, 2)have 4 electrons in its outer shell?
And if this is correct, would the lithium superatom then behave like carbon? Is dilithium really lithium superatom diamond (or graphite, or fullerene, or aggregated nanorod, etc.)?
That fits with what I recall reading as well. In my response to Cary below, you'll see why its possible diamond-like properties very much interested me.
When laying out my conception of how warp drive might work, I learned that the dimensioning of the negative energy ribbon around a starship (or within a "warp ring" or "coil") would probably be critical to the size and stability of the wormhole created. So I began to think about what might be used to "dimension" negative energy, that was already a part of the Treknologists' repertoire. That is how I began to ruminate on the possible nature of dilithium -- I imagined it as a possible refractor of negative energy.
One problem with this whole superatom idea is that dilithium was portrayed in Star Trek as a naturally occurring substance, to be bargained for with natives and miners. If it were a superatom, I imagine it would only occur naturally in some pretty exotic locales. Like deep in a gas giant. That's why I like to imagine that those planets where it was found in Star Trek were all orbiting gas giants...
It doesn't look like it has been updated in a while. Interestingly, and in another case of almost eerie TOS prescience, Jefferies specified a "magnetohydrodynamic vernier pulse" for NOMAD. VASIMR is based on magnetohydrodynamic principles, and one could easily see it being employed on a deep space probe, maybe in our lifetimes.
Nomad Schematic
Pretty cool, huh?
The problem with that, of course, is that we regularly see characters dig it up, handle it, toss it about, and use it for jewelry. Dilithium (Li2) as a silicate style crystal is interesting, just not real, as we know. Dilithium as part of a lattice ceramic? A bit more acceptable with 'real' physics... but, it's tricky since we all know that Roddenberry was thinking of lithium batteries at the time...
As for tri-cobalt, there's nothing mentioned that indictes that the 'tri' is actually a scientific prefix for cobalt. It could be nothing more than a cobat bomb with three layers of nuclear compression to deliver its yield. That's a nasty amount of dirty energy when you think about it...
As for tri-cobalt, there's nothing mentioned that indictes that the 'tri' is actually a scientific prefix for cobalt. It could be nothing more than a cobat bomb with three layers of nuclear compression to deliver its yield. That's a nasty amount of dirty energy when you think about it...
About Dilithium being a possible reflector of negitive energy, that gets us right back to PCMM's.
Avaiable at Kay Jewelers.
The big problem with dilithium crystals being THAT special is how casually they're treated. It would be one thing if they were in containment or something... but they're just raw and exposed all the time.Rhodinium, if I remember the script right. It's been awhile, though, and my mind is in a questionable state.
Which is actually something that's a bit odd... in my take on the bridge, the red railings are actually padded... so that's something like foam rubber on top of them giving them the red color. Hard to imagine polishing that! (FYI, there's also a "pad" along the edge of the consoles, and on three of the sides of teh helm console... if it's red (except for the lift door), it's a cushion... something you could get tossed into and hurt yourself if it didn't have some form of protection on it. (At least, that's my logic...)
Named after Rodimus Prime, savior of Cyberton!
We can go back to discussing the second periodic table, if the group desires it...
