[criley2]

This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares the cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off R&D prototypes.

Maybe new technology made in a lab can one day scale up and compete against current low-cost high-scale solutions. Crazy idea, I know.

However, trying to artificially limit all discussion about R&D and future tech by claiming "it's more expensive than fully scaled solutions" has got to be full luddism. This loom prototype is too expensive! I can hire a man for a shilling a day!

[kerkeslager]

> This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares the cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off R&D prototypes.

No, even at scale, materials that you can extract from ore are inherently going to be cheaper than materials you have to extract from three different ores and then crystallize, even in a manufacturing lab. These just aren't comparable processes, and no amount of scale is ever going to fix that.

Instead of assuming I'm making a disingenuous point, you might have asked for clarification.

That's setting aside the problems others have brought up, which is that the materials in question have other properties besides conductivity which make these materials inappropriate for transmission application.

[u320]

No, switching from raw aluminium to an obscure synthesised compound is not going to be worth it for a few % efficieny gain. We've had centuries of "scale up" with copper and it's still not worth it.

[benj111]

Still isn't going to work.

>material requiring lab crystallization

How are you going to string a crystals between towers? The material properties are all wrong for this application.

[kergonath]

Aluminium and copper in cables are crystals. The crystal bit is not the problem.

[benj111]

I'm not sure of the correct scientific language here.

As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible material so my point about the mechanical properties still stands.

And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal. Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals, except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.

[kergonath]

> As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible material so my point about the mechanical properties still stands.

Yes. You want them to be ductile (malleable, or that can be deformed permanently in less-technical language). Although they could also be flexible (meaning that they can deform, but go back to their natural shape if we stop applying a force), as in the case of fibre optics cables, which are actually not crystals but quite brittle.

The interesting twist is that a solid pretty much has to be a crystal to be malleable. Almost all the metals you can think of are in their crystalline state.

> And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal.

I don’t know. From my experience people equate crystals with shiny things without really thinking about it. But this is HN, and we should try to be a bit better than a random person on the street. After all, most people don’t know a web browser from an OS, but I would be ridiculed if I make that confusion here.

It is a wonderful community where you are almost certain to discuss with some experts in pretty much any given field, it is a great opportunity to learn and grow.

> Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals

If you’ve seen solid aluminium, then you’ve seen it as a crystal. It is pretty much impossible with common techniques to get non-crystalline solid aluminium.

> except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.

That’s the thing, I don’t know what you think of when you say “crystal”. In actual fact, a crystal is a state of condensed matter in which atoms or ions are aligned in a 3-dimensional pattern that can be replicated to fill the space. In the case of aluminium, you can actually see how the atoms are arranged in a periodic way in articles such as this one (figure 3): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323423565_Anomalous... . There are many other examples, and it is absolutely fascinating. We have the tools to count atoms and see the structure of the material!

And it is undoubtedly a crystal.

[benj111]

Ok so what is the terminology to refer to this class of materials?

A ceramic?

I'm happy to accept that internet explorer isn't an OS, but it would be nice to know what terminology you would find acceptable.

[kergonath]

I am not the one deciding on terminology. In this case, both copper and aluminium are crystalline metals. Any lump of these is actually formed of a lot of smaller crystals bunched up together in what we call polycrystals. This is why they don't have the nice geometrical shapes people tend to associate with crystals in pop culture. But depending on how the material was made, these geometrical features can be seen with a magnifier or a microscope.

I am not blaming you, I know the knowledge of the general population of this sort of things is not great and you cannot know it before some tells you. A whole bunch of new age scams would completely fall apart if most people actually knew what a crystal is and where we can find them.

They are not ceramics because this is used for compounds with elements such as oxygen or nitrogen, which is not applicable here. Aluminium oxide, Al2O3, which used in sapphire "glass" in watches, is a ceramic that contains aluminium.