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Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

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Re: Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

#91

Post by noisy_boy »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #5
throwup238 wrote: post #3

Here we go again... Another nobel prize, another decade of impotent battery news, and countless superconductivity false starts.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the grea…

Only the horseman falls on the battlefield, how will that child fall who crawls on his knees.

Shah Abdul Aziz Dehlavi

Re: Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

#92

Post by manmal »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #31
WatchDog wrote: post #20

Is single atom thick gold somewhat optically transparent?

Definitely yes. Gold is surprisingly transparent for a metal. Famously, gold plating is used on astronaut helmet visors, at 200 nm thickness - i.e. ~1200 atoms thick.

It is also used as a coating for window panes, as it‘s great at reflecting infrared radiation (reducing heat loss). My father‘s house has such windows.

Re: Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

#93

Post by Qwertious »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #90
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever your feelings about nuclear power, you can't really argue with the reason they think it has "failed to make the grade": > “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter” – Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1954.

The United States has failed at nuclear power. It's much more successful elsewhere.

Where is nuclear energy too cheap to meter?

Re: Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

#94

Post by beretguy »

manmal wrote: post #92
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely yes. Gold is surprisingly transparent for a metal. Famously, gold plating is used on astronaut helmet visors, at 200 nm thickness - i.e. ~1200 atoms thick.

It is also used as a coating for window panes, as it‘s great at reflecting infrared radiation (reducing heat loss). My father‘s house has such windows.

Are those windows expensive?

Re: Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

#95

Post by IshKebab »

amelius wrote: post #71
IshKebab wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you really distort the definitions. The "empty space" you are thinking about is the matter. You can't just put other stuff there. There's a similar wrong meme about how you never really "touch" anything.

> There's a similar wrong meme about how you never really "touch" anything. Ok, what is the exact moment you touch something? How close do the atoms need to be?

There isn't an exact moment, any more than there is an exact height that is "tall". And yet, tall people exist.

Re: Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

#96

Post by dorianh »

dhosek wrote: post #82

If it weren’t for the captions, I would assume that every single photo in this article was stock photography: “Scientists doing sciencey things.”

I like the second picture where it looks like the professor is making sure that the material is indeed one atom thin, but not two!

Re: Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

#97

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

Qwertious wrote: post #93
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States has failed at nuclear power. It's much more successful elsewhere.

Where is nuclear energy too cheap to meter ?

Measuring success this way is nonsensical. Is there anything that is too cheap to meter? Are other forms of energy also unsuccessful until they produce energy too cheap too meter? This isn't serious criteria.

The argument is that this is a silly framing with which to judge success. I agree!

I for one am extremely content consuming energy, more than half of which is nuclear, followed by hydro. It is very successful.

Re: Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

#98

Post by toss1 »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #70
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever your feelings about nuclear power, you can't really argue with the reason they think it has "failed to make the grade": > “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter” – Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1954.

Disagree. The comment is on price. Price is driven by a huge number of factors. It's not as simple as "if nuclear is successful, price is low otherwise it's high". One of those reasons is that when someone is more available you consume more, making price sticky. Also, consider where that comment comes from. It comes from a person who benefits from arguing that nuclear has magical economic powers. So you're saying tha…

The price comment was not about "price is low"; it was about it becoming SO plentiful that the overhead in metering the cost would exceed the revenue and it could be just an on/off subscription

This HAS happened with telecom services, where long-distance calls used to even be sometimes only one town over, and were charged by the minute. Toll-free (800)- numbers were a big deal. Now, the network is so successful and calls so numerous that it is literally too cheap to meter - you either subscribe or you don't. Per-call metering is only the case in some international calls.

Nuclear electric power could have become this ubiquitous and successful, where the overhead of per-kilo-Watt metering outweighed the revenues. It would have merely had to scale up several more orders of magnitude. THIS was the prediction.

Obviously, although nuclear did have some success this did not happen. The costs of commissioning, building, and decommissioning individual plants were just too high.

We cannot conflate the actual modest success, producing barely 20% of power in the US in 1995[0], with the prediction of nuclear succeeding like telecomm.

It did not happen.

I think it could yet happen with some of the new small (neighborhood-scale), self-contained, inherently safe designs. But that is another prediction.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273208/nuclear-share-of-...

Re: Goldene: A single atom layer of gold

#100

Post by formerly_proven »

manmal wrote: post #92
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely yes. Gold is surprisingly transparent for a metal. Famously, gold plating is used on astronaut helmet visors, at 200 nm thickness - i.e. ~1200 atoms thick.

It is also used as a coating for window panes, as it‘s great at reflecting infrared radiation (reducing heat loss). My father‘s house has such windows.

Stealth aircraft also use gold-plated canopies to a) contain emissions from the cockpit to the cockpit b) reflect incoming radiation of a well-defined surface instead of whatever mess is inside the cockpit.
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