Can I Touch That?

Actually, probably yes.

The that comes from an article that I found in an amazing place. Here's the deal. I used to read the Wall Street Journal. Now, I'd read it because (I admit this is a strange) there was a character in a spy novel, whose name I don't recall any more, and he read the WSJ; why, I don't know -- maybe the author was trying to give the character a whimsical quality (Let me see how my stock's doing before I kill you), but I thought that it sounded interesting. Only, it wasn't -- it was mostly numbers and Amalgamated Geewhizostat is proud to announce first quarter earnings are up, the result of its new Turbomax line of... yeah, yeah, whatever. But I did find that the WSJ had articles on the first page that were almost always interesting -- usually having some kind of relation to business,but what I'd call the human side of it -- the people who designed the paint room for Lexus, for example, or a guy who makes a living doing acoustic imaging for libraries. So it wasn't that unusual to find that the Financial Times, which I think of as an exceedingly dull paper that makes the WSJ look racy, actually has pretty interesting articles. Like this one, an article about the world's most unusual compounds.

How unusual? Take Aerogel: the world’s lightest solid consists of 99.8 per cent air and looks like a vague, hazy mass. And yet despite its insubstantial nature, it is remarkably strong; and because of its ability to nullify convection, conduction and radiation, it also happens to be the best insulator in the world. Sitting next to the Aerogel is its thermal opposite, a piece of aluminium nitride, which is such an effective conductor of heat that if you grasp a blunt wafer of it in your hand, the warmth of your body alone allows it to cut through ice. Nearby are panes of glass that clean themselves, metal that remembers the last shape it was twisted into, and a thin tube of Tin Stick which, when bent, emits a sound like a human cry. There’s a tub of totally inert fluorocarbon liquid into which any electronic device can be placed and continue to function. The same liquid has been used to replace the blood in lab rats, which also, oddly enough, continue to function.

There are turbine jet-engine blades grown from a single crystal and designed to function in the most inhospitable places on the planet. There’s a swatch of the world’s blackest black, 25 times blacker than conventional black paint. There’s a lead bell that refuses to ring, a piece of bone with a saw through it, and the largest blob of Silly Putty you’re ever likely to see

The collection was started by a man who is a materials scientist, who found that, unlike his peers, he really liked to touch the materials he learned about and with which he worked. He felt that it helped him understand the materials better, and besides, it was fun. I don't understand much of what he does, but that, I can definitely agree with. So - can I touch that?