Can We Make Thor's Indestructible Hammer?

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• published: 20 Nov 2013
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Share on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/11mr4Pp Is it possible to design Thor's hammer in the REAL world? In the future, we'll have materials that are both invulnerable to damage and self-healing. From carbon nanotubes, to carbyne and amorphous metals, just by manipulating a few molecules, we can create materials for everything from better electronics to space elevators! If you could make something out of an indestructible material, what would it be? Let us know in the comments below! -------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe to Fw:Thinking: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=fwthinking For the audio podcast, blog and more, visit the Fw:Thinking website: http://www.fwthinking.com Fw:Thinking on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fwthinking Jonathan Stickland on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jonstrickland Fw:Thinking on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/FWThinking01 Fw:Thinking on Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/108500616405453822675/ [TRANSCRIPT]: Is it possible the strongest stuff in the universe is just one atom thick? Hey guys, it's Jonathan Strickland with Fw:Thinking. I'm here at the movie theatre. I'm about to catch the next Thor film, which got me to thinking about his mighty hammer, which as we all know is made out of Uru, a nigh-invulerable material. Which got me to thinking, is there such a stuff here in the real world? Material science has come an incredibly long way. For example: carbon nanotubes. I know you've heard about them, they're the stuff of the future. What are they? Well, take a sheet of carbon atoms. It's one atom thick. Roll it into a tube. This thing is hundreds of times stronger than steel, and six times lighter. And for a while it was the strongest stuff we could imagine, which kind of puts some limitations on what we want to do in the future. But those limitations can say "Bye, bye." I'm talking about carbyne. This is just a string of carbon atoms that have single and triple bonds between them, and it ends up being twice as strong as graphene, and nearly three times stronger than diamond. Now that means this stuff could possibly have the tensile strength that we would need to make something like, I don't know...a space elevator! So this is kind of a super material. But still not invincible. Now amorphous metals have been super cooled and formed in such a way that they don't have a crystalline structure. They're much more messy. They get really locked down. So if you strike it, those layers have nowhere to go, and it's much more resilient to impact. But they're also really malleable, so you can form them into whatever you like. It's pretty awesome. I can finally make my Thor hammer, right? Eh, there is a drawback. They actually suffer from fatigue more readily than regular metals do. So after whackin' a few bad guys my hammer's gonna break. But that's where self-healing materials come in. Some guys at MIT were playing around with some nickel alloy and they noticed that microscopic tears in the metal were healing themselves after pressure was being applied to other parts of the metal. Stressing this material made it stronger. It would heal other injuries. This is phenomenal stuff. If we can engineer this, imagine the possibilities. We're talking buildings that heal themselves, bridges that repair themselves, airplane wings that get stronger the more times we fly! Now, none of this stuff is going to get me my immortal, invulnerable hammer. But I think it's pretty cool that just by manipulating a few molecules, we can make everything from electronics better, to find a new way to get to the moon!