Giant ping pong balls at the speed of light

I’m fond of telling people that in the last twenty years, technology has changed the way the world works but in the next twenty, it will start to change how the world looks. Materials science is perhaps one of the most exciting areas of research right now, with money flooding into research into two dimensional and meta materials with incredible properties.

Think about the difference between the world before plastics and the world after. Think about the shapes, weights and textures of so many objects that would have been previously unfamiliar. Now imagine a transformation of the same magnitude in the materials from which we make cars, buildings, and clothes. Think about a world where the previously impossible, becomes possible, because we have materials that are stronger, lighter, more insulating or more conductive.

Of course, not all of this is going to happen in the next twenty years. There’s still a lot of fundamental science and manufacturing development to be done on these new materials. But we’ll see early applications that will shift our expectations for what certain objects look like.

Rockets & shuttles

Take the Breakthrough Starshot programme, an ambitious plan announced in April 2016 to send a spacecraft to a planet orbiting our nearest star.

We all have ideas in our heads about what spacecraft look like. We’ve spent years — decades — absorbing news of rockets and shuttles, and having our imaginations stretched by depictions of craft in science fiction. But the ‘nanocraft’ planned for this project look nothing like that.

The latest research suggests that they might be giant ping pong balls, a few metres across but weighing just a couple of grams, including all of the electronics. To put that into context, the cereal bar I just ate was 30 grams: I just ate the equivalent of fifteen space ships.

As you can probably guess, there will be no passengers on this craft, which will be accelerated up to a fraction of the speed of light in just a few minutes by being pounded with photons from a giant laser array here on earth.

Making these giant ping pong balls will test the limits of our understanding of materials. You may never see one. But the money that goes into their development will probably drive changes in objects you see every day.

The Victorian Arrogance Trap

Back in 1899, Punch magazine carried a satirical sketch looking at the coming century. In it a genius enters a publisher's office seeking a patents clerk, only to be told: “Sir. Everything that can be invented, has been invented.”This quote has since been attributed to various real-life characters with (it appears) very little evidence, and used to support the popular idea that the Victorians, in their arrogance, thought they had invented everything.You can see why a piece of satire became accepted as fact. The idea has the ring of truth to it. Walk around the cities of Manchester or Liverpool and look up at the architecture from the turn of the century and it is brimming with confidence. The preceding 100 year period had seen incredible progress — the industrial revolution — utterly transforming the UK. To live then, assuming you were reasonably well off, must have felt like you’d arrived in the future.I think we all fall into this trap sometimes. As I pointed out in my last post, it’s hard to imagine just how much life could yet transform. And yet we know so very little.I’m reminded of this every time I listen to an episode of Radiolab. Podcasts are one of my primary sources of information. The means by which I try to stay abreast of a lot of areas of science and technology with very limited time. One of my absolute favourites is Radiolab from public radio in the US.A recent episode carried the story of giant viruses, a class of life that has been around for millions of years but that we only discovered since the turn of the century. The discovery of this new class of life that shares traits of both viruses and bacteria shows how many biological things there likely are still on this planet that we haven’t yet witnessed. The gaps in our knowledge of the physics of the universe are greater still. And the things we have yet to invent using that knowledge, near limitless.A recent episode of another of my favourite podcasts, The Infinite Monkey Cage, guests discussed the possibility that we may well be the smartest beings in our galaxy, based on the lack of evidence to date of other civilisations. Whether or not that’s the case, when measured against the number of things we don’t yet know, we should be very humble about our achievements so far.