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"Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Memory Plastic | ||
| Takes various shapes impressed into it on command. |
Just how many different functions can you design into a single room? Lots, if you're using memory plastic.
| I'd glanced into the bathroom, knowing what I would find. It was the size of a comfortable shower stall. An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic, to become a washroom, a shower stall, a toilet, a dressing room, a steam cabinet. Luxurious in everything but size, as long as you pushed the right buttons. |
| Technovelgy from Death by Ecstasy,
by Larry Niven. Published by Galaxy Magazine in 1969 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the plastex from J.G. Ballard's 1962 story The Thousand Dreams of Stella Vista.
This kind of material is starting to make headlines almost forty years after Niven wrote about the idea; I don't know if this is an original idea of Niven's or whether the idea was in the air in the late 1960's.
The new materials, known as "triple-shape materials," can assume three different shapes, each shape depending on how much heat is applied.
This landmark achievement comes from the laboratories of chemical engineer Robert Langer of MIT and polymer chemist Andreas Lendlein of the Helmholtz Institute in Teltow, Germany.
Researchers at MIT and the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers have invented a class of materials so remarkable for their agility in changing shape as they react to heat, they might be described as acrobatic plastics.
"The series above illustrates the triple shape effect of a fastener consisting of a plate with two anchors prepared from CL(50)EG: Starting at 20 degrees Celsius, the device, in an easily-handled form, is put into a scaffold, right, which might be difficult to access (a). Increasing the temperature to 40 C triggers unfolding and positioning into the cavity, left (figures b to d). Increasing the temperature to 60 C enables the anchors of the fastener to open and to couple the device into a well-defined position (e to f). In both series, above and left, the material CL(50)EG used to produce the demonstration object is a two-phase polymer network consisting of 50 percent poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) by weight and 50 percent poly(e-caprolactone) (PCL) by weight. Photo / GKSS Research Center 2006"
Triple shape materials at MIT
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More Ideas
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Tech news articles related to Death by Ecstasy
Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| GNoME AI From DeepMind Invents Millions Of New Materials |
| Omniphobic Liquid-like Surfaces And de Camp's Telelubricator (1940) |
| MXenes - Atomic-Thin Metal Sheets Now Easier To Make |
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'...the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded.'
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'
'...the combined Wind-Suncatcher, like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'I went to the control room where the three other men were manipulating their mechanical men.'
'The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course.'
'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
