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"The best fuzzy rules, the best knowledge, deal with the turning points of the system. If a race-car driver teaches you how to drive, you don't need him to show you how to drive on the straightaway. It's how he handles the curves that matters."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Unobtainium | ||
| A humorous reference to a substance both rare and unlikely. |
Although Brin did not coin the word "unobtainium" he might well be the first user of it in science fiction. See the discussion below.
| None of the other moons in the Kthsemenee system had the one attribute this one possessed: a core of almost one percent unobtainium. Already thirty of the Brothers' ships had landed, to begin construction of the Weapon. |
| Technovelgy from Startide Rising,
by David Brin. Published by Bantam in 1983 Additional resources -
|
The best guesses as to the origin of the word place it in the field of aerospace, which has been pushing the envelope in the field of materials science for at least a century.
As reported in the Marshall Evening Chronicle (Marshall, Michigan) on February 27, 1956:
However, it can be found even earlier in a 1930 German work "Dechema-Monographium Vol 39 page 12 link:
[Google Translate: ...Weight equal to zero. An American has jokingly called this material once the element "Unobtainium".]
The earliest reference to something like this (that is, a humorous name for a material that does not exist) is as far as I know "Bolognium" from Transactions of Amer Soc for Steel Treating, by Edgar Bain, in 1926.
Scientists are now working on a new metal to be used in making the noses on intercontinental ballistics missiles. The metal is so hard to come by that the scientists have devised a lugubriously-humorous name for it. They call it ‘unobtainium’.
...Gewicht gleich Null. Ein Amerikaner hat diesen Werkstoff scherzhafterweise einmal das Element "Unobtainium" genannt.
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Additional
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and Technology from Startide Rising
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and Technology by David Brin
Tech news articles related to Startide Rising
Tech news articles related to works by David Brin
| Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly |
| Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer |
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| GNoME AI From DeepMind Invents Millions Of New Materials |
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
