On Thu, May 08, 2014 at 09:44:30AM -0700, William Ewing (via tml list) wrote:
> This email was sent from yahoo.com which does not allow forwarding of emails via email lists. Therefore the sender's email address (xxxxxx@yahoo.com) has been replaced with a dummy one. The original message follows:
>
> It seemed to me that MT implied that iron was the start point, first for crystaliron, then for superdense and bonded superdense.
>
> Some ideas I've tossed around:

> 1. Superdense means a hair-sized skeleton of near-collapsium inside
> a foamed metal beam / plate / etc.

One setting I've seen uses the idea of stable muons(*) to form muonic
matter.  It would behave much like ordinary electron-based atoms, but
about 1/200th the radius and with bonds 200 times stronger.  The net
effect would be a material about ten million times denser, but capable
of supporting stresses about a billion times greater.  If a
microscopic fraction of muons are replaced with electrons, it will
also interact with ordinary matter(**).

In Traveller TL terms:

At the first TLs where it appears, it may only be possible to produce
filaments of the material, which can be embedded into ordinary matter
to strengthen it.

Later technology allows constructing aerogel-like structures where the
filaments are bonded together, giving additional stiffness and
strength independent of the surrounding ordinary matter.

Further developments allow controlled growth of regular lattices of
the material, along with a whole range of tailored properties becoming
possible.

(*) In the setting, the nuclei are actually strange matter.  That is,
each nucleus has at least one strange quark in it.  The handwaving is
that a previously unknown type of weak force interaction between the
muons and strange quarks keeps both from decaying.  How convenient!

(**) Purely muonic atoms would not interact significantly with
electrons.  The main force preventing them from freely passing through
each other would be electrical repulsion when their nuclei approached
very closely.  In fact, they would be close enough for nuclear
reactions to occur at a signficant rate.  To avoid such nuclear
interactions, it would be safest to make muonic matter from the most
stable isotope of nickel or iron.  These are the most inert in nuclear
terms.

- Tim