As I recall things, Krypotonians were originally super-powered even on their home planet, being just more “highly evolved” humans. This was okay with the early Supes, who was only slightly more powerful than Spider-Man is now, but became problematic as his power level increased. So then they added the idea that Krypton was much larger (or denser) than Earth, with a correspondingly higher gravity, and so the humanoids there had evolved greater physical abilities. Which again sort-of explained the strength and speed, and perhaps the flight, but not the energy powers (heat vision, x-ray vision, arctic breath).
So then they added the idea that yellow-sun radiation was also a factor. Initially the notion WASN’T that Kryptonians were solar batteries, incidentally; yellow-sun radiation was just magic, from their point of view, and anything from Krypton became more or less super on Earth. Unliving objects like the metal from Kal’s spaceship, or the blankets in which he was swaddled, simply become indestructible to any Earthly force. Mammals got super-powers; Krypto the Super-Dog got most of his master’s powers (except super-ventriloquism), along with human-level intelligence. (Still couldn’t talk, though.)
I believe it was with the Byrne reboot that it became official that living humanoid Kryptonians were solar batteries. The energy from their own star wasn’t enough to turn them super,but the longer they were under a yellow sun the stronger they became, rather than instantly getting the whole powerset the second they were exposed to it.
That’s about the best I could give as a cite, along with the tvtropes article on Counter-Earth. Apparently it was a common mind-worm in soft sci-fi for a time.
Upsidaisium reminds me: Anybody mention cavorite yet? An anti-gravity materials from H.G. Well’s First Men on the Moon, and the McGuffin in Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
I admit a moment of surprise when I saw “XeF[sub]4[/sub]” in a college chemistry textbook. I thought it was a typo, after being told for years that inert gases don’t form compounds. Then reading on about just how greedily electronegative Fluorine is, I started to look at Xenon Tetrafluoride like four fratboys raping a drunken high school girl.
Anyhoo…
What about scrith?
After that, we could go on to twing.
All this talk of materials and their names reminds me of a story that I’m assured is true.
In 1976, a group of physicists thought that they had discovered element 129.
129 protons is in an island of stability (i.e. theory says that it has non-radioactive isotopes) and they thought that they had found in in a geode.
Well, they were writing up the paper and had to give this stuff its official name. A Reagan appointee at NSF (their funding source) suggested “bicentenium”. To avoid that horrible fate, they rushed to finish the paper and named the element after the Florida county where they found the geode. The found it in Lyno county and called the new element “lynoleum”.
Scrith is opaque to, what, 40% of neutrinos, that is just plain absurd. How could such a material be fabricated to remain stable? Not even true neutronium is that opaque.
The whole story of Ringworld is meant just to smack the reader upside the head with the concept that this thing is unimaginably advanced. The high neutrino opacity was just one of the many little ways Niven pulled that off. One can accept, just maybe, something that’s 100% opaque to neutrinos, like a stasis field or a GP hull. But 40%? It boggles the mind.
And merickson, the islands of stability are a relative thing. Nobody knows just exactly how stable they would be, but it could well mean “half-life of seconds instead of nanoseconds”.
Kryptonite, being a metallic element named for the planet Krypton (the only known soruce), should be called kryptonium, by rights, but the people who named it were radio writers, not chemists, so you can’t really expect much.
There seems to be some debate as to whether kryptonite is an element or an alloy. The name would suggest an alloy, which would explain the variety of colors it comes in. Presumably, one could synthesize a kryptonite in the lab, but at least one constituent is unknown, so that would make it kind of a challenge.
If it’s 40% Neutrino opaque for any thickness of Scrith, then yes, that really is interesting - I guess it would imply some sort of dimensional weirdness - where the material isn’t really there as solid matter at all - but rather, what appears to be a finite chunk of something solid is in fact a single, object-shaped field.
Star Trek also uses Latinum as currency, and the episode “Balance of Terror” had Rodinium, which Spock called the “hardest substance known to our science.”
Speaking of which, anybody mention Adamantium yet?