No shit. something can be reflective without being entirely opaque.
Yes I do. what the hell does that have to do with anything? Take a pressed CD. put a bright flashlight on the other side of it, and turn it on. you’ll see the light from the flashlight pass through, though not nearly as bright.
PROTIP: CD uses an infrared laser. the reflective layer of a CD might pass (attenuated) visible light while reflecting invisible infrared light. before you scoff at someone, try to make sure you know what you’re talking about.
In the movie that inspired this thread, I believe “transparent aluminium” was indeed a complex molecule. And I think that makes sense; otherwise what would we even mean by transparent <material that is not transparent>?
Ok, answering my own question, we could nowadays mean a metamaterial, but clearly they didn’t in the film (it was before we’d invented such things), and I don’t think it’s such a weird use of language. It’s something like “leaded petrol”, where the lead is within a molecule.
Well, they could possibly mean something like the multiple states of water (H2O). Asking for “hot ice” seems like a contradiction, but it’s possible to get solid water ice at very high temperatures if other conditions (like high pressure) permit.
Or the multiple structures of carbon: graphite and diamond are both carbon, just a different arrangements of the atomic bonds.
Hydrogen exhibits metallic behavior at sufficient pressures/densities.
Haha… in fact, maybe the Federation’s posting boards are full of ads for the “Housewife’s one simple trick” that will leave aluminum in a metastable transparent configuration.
Well in fact I recall that the computer actually displays the molecular structure.
I remember rolling my eyes at the time, thinking it was another example of a magical film computer, but actually it’s possible a company like that could have some kind of simple molecule renderer, even then. And just about within the bounds of credulity that scotty could figure out how to use it (especially if we fanwank that the few seconds of typing we see him do is really a montage of several hours of software training).
What’s more far-fetched is that the 20th century guys would immediately know this substance’s properties, but again we can imagine off-screen trials.
He traded the formula for “transparent aluminum” for a quantity of plastic? I thought he traded the formula for transparent aluminum for a quantity of transparent aluminum!
No, it’s pretty clear from their discussions that he was trading for a quantity of the plastic they already had there (“We have that in stock” “Aye, I noticed”). Besides, it’s highly improbable that they’d install groundbreaking technology and be producing sheets of a revolutionary new product so quickly.
I can’t find the picture, but I remember seeing a photo of the back side of the Macintosh used in that scene. The computer had been gutted and the picture the audience saw was generated outside the computer and fed into the CRT via a coax cable. A bit disappointing, but considering the power of the original Mac, or even the Mac+, understandable. Those were nice machines for the day though!
Maybe I got it from a novelization or something, but I always got the idea that Scotty’s formula was a lie. Heck, I thought that was the joke, that it was absurd that a metal could somehow be a transparent compound.
I didn’t learn that transparent aluminum was used on the Enterprise-D until much later. And, even now, I cling to the idea that Scotty’s formula wasn’t quite accurate and thus didn’t work, or else history would have been dramatically changed.
For what it’s worth, Born and Wolf’s Principles of Optics gives the refractive index of bulk aluminum as 1.44 and n times K as 5.23 (both at 589.3 microns). The characteristic penetration depth of metal is the wavelength divided by (4pi times nK), so at that wavelength (pretty close to the middle of the visible), the penetration depth is just shy of a micron. If you’ve got a piece of aluminum that thin, you can see light through it. Thin coatings on a transparent substrate might fit the bill, but often plastic sheets and other media have isolated “islands” of aluminum surrounded by uncoated areas, so you might not be looking through a thin coating of aluminum, but around little blotches of aluminum. aluminized glass is more likely to actually be covered by a uniformly thin layer of aluminum.
The movie did make mention that the guy Scotty gave the formula to was the one who eventually developed TA, so maybe Scotty just gave him enough of the formula to get him headed in the right direction. [/fanwank]
As I remember the conversation, someone else (perhaps Bones?) said to Scotty, “Aren’t you changing history?” to which he replied, “How do we know that he didn’t invent it?”
BTW, my theory is that when transparent aluminum is developed, it will be the result of research by the Coca-Cola Company, so they can make those aluminum soda bottles transparent.
[Star Trek IV bashing] I never understood why people like this film so much. It’s almost as stupid as ST-V.
I don’t even know why they needed transparent aluminium, or transparent anything for that matter. The whales don’t care. They don’t need to see into the passenger compartment. They can ride in a closed tank for the brief time it takes to go 300 years.
Where, after being released into the wild, they immediately told the probe how humans had killed off all the whales. The probe then finished destroying all life on the planet. It then went on and destroyed all the Borg as well, as it was incredibly powerful. And the universe was made safe for cetaceans, the one true intelligent life form in the galaxy. [end rant]
At least all the Star Trek movies 2 through ∞ were an improvement over STTM the First, which was nothing more than a lame re-make of The Changeling (the I am Nomad episode). ETA: And having such realistic CGI effects that looked just like CGI effects.
