In 1986 Scotty gave the formula and process for transparent aluminum to an engineering and manufacturing company that was capable of transparency at 4" thick and many times stronger than steel just to get home.
Slight correction - transparent aluminum was strong enough that a 1" thick sheet would withstand the same PSI as acrylic polymer 6" thick. Also, he only provided the molecular structure - the rest was for them to figure out.
I love this channel. Some days it's like "here's a cool silly thing you can do with physics," then other days it's like "here's an explanation of fundamental concepts of matter and energy that you never really thought about and should probably be over your head but I'll explain it in a way that'll give you a solid layperson understanding that will make mundane things suddenly cooler."
That was my favorite thing about this video. I was fascinated by the explanation of the behavior of electrons in metals and their interaction with external waves.
Most music compact disc (CDs) , despite their silver color, are also transparent enough to allow some light to pass through- which is evident in sunlight and with other bright light sources like lasers
My friends and I viewed an annular solar eclipse through a CD one time. They thought I was a genius, haha, but I'd dimply noticed you can look at the sun through a CD when I was a kid. I viewed another partial solar eclipse through a CD a few years later. Works really good.
If I recall correctly, there are actually many more "transparent" metals. It's just that they are transparent in radiation ranges close to visible, but not in it. For example, Germanium is used to make lenses for thermal vision optic due to its infrared range transparency. Also, germania (germanium dioxide) is used in visible range photography optics and as optical fibre cores.
@@jash21222 A glass can be a metall. Ever heard of metallic glass? Easy to Google and to look at. If you don't know stuff about metallic glass, maybe don't use that as an example. Also, ever heard about the metallicity about stars? Is that about metals? No it's not always.
@@jash21222 please read my sentence again because I think you misunderstood what I meant. I meant and said that those exist, and by talking about metallic/metallicity, it's not always implied that the element talked about is a metal in on itself. No idea why you seem to be so angry over that, because that's just how it is. E.g. Metallicity of stars, metallic glass etc etc.
I was surprised that you did not mention that these semi transparent mirror have plenty of technical applications like interferometry, simultaneous projection and measurement, etc.
Strange that we usually don't see the alkali metals like sodium do that cool effect despite how commonly we see people adding the metals (especially sodium) into water.
NaOH and KOH are eagerly soluble in water, so much hydrophilic in fact that they crystallize from solution as hydrates, NaOH‧H2O, taking a molecule of water with them even to crystals. This is why you don't see the hydroxydes if you let metal float on top of water. This experiment is amazing! And quite dangerous if done carelessly, too, as it ends with molten caustic soda flying around at the very end-this stuff burns through skin faster that you could wash it.
This property is what allows 'one-way' mirrors to work. So, however, the amount of transmission is relative to how much light is present, which is why it's important for the room behind such a mirror to be dimly lit, or lit entirely by light transmitted through the mirror. One quirk of this is that if you cast a shadow on a one-way mirror, you can darken one part of it to the point where the transmission across both sides is about equal, and then actually peer past the mirror to see what's behind it.
Substances generally have the same transmittance, reflectance, and absorbance in all directions. The thing is that when the space on one of a pane of glass is very well lit compared to the other, enough light from the light side reflects off the pane to drown out the light that makes it through from the dark side. You can try this out with your own exterior windows at night: pick a window that looks out into a dark space and turn on all the lights in that room.
@@jdotoz Well yes, the absolute transmission, being what percentage of light makes it through, doesn't vary across either side, but the relative transmission does, since both sides are at different levels of illumination, thus one side is having more photons pass through it, simply because more light is shining on that side.
The simplest way to think about this is "signal to noise ratio" If it's bright on your side, the amount of light reflected into your eyes showing the scene on your side (the "noise") overwhelms the transmitted view of the scene on the other side (the "signal"). As you vary the amount of reflected light, the amount of transmitted light doesn't change, but the ratio does.
I believe the correct term to use for the plastic film coated with the aluminum Oxide is translucent, not transparent. On the whole this was a very interesting video and educational. Thanks for sharing.
Fun fact that I learned recently: metals would be different colors if we could see UV. Basically, metals have electric field resonances...how quickly forces tend to be passed through the electron cloud. EM radiation of the resonant frequency will be absorbed. For most metals, the resonant frequency is somewhere in the UV range. Gold and copper are two of very few metals with a resonant frequency in the visible range (blue), hence they have color to us, instead of just looking grey / silver.
I had alot of lead, maybe 40-50 lb., from alot of things and desided to melt together and put into forms to be able to stack and store it better. In a lg. Iron kettle, I melted it and remove all the junk that floated on top, poured into the forms, but they ended up all with a curved bottom, so remelted it all again, and skimmed the top many times. It seemed to become clear but dark and was sure I could see the bottom of the kettle through it, but then a skin would form over the top, but reskimming, it would again appear clear. I'm sure there were some other metals in with it, tin and maybe silver or other low melt temp. metals. I tried sticking things like a wire into it and it looked like I could see them though it, but it was hard to say as the top was also a good mirror and putting to much light on it would increase that.
Discovery is so weird like that huh? I think we all probably discover something completely new in our lifetimes that has no current explanation. If you try I bet you could recreate it again
@@versag3776 At that time, about 20 years ago, I thought it must be a known thing, that I just didn't remember reading about it or missed, until this video. To bad that a few years ago I melted most of that down to add some new, but do have the a few pounds of that old stuff that I had cast into bullets for an old cannon I use to have and might be enough to test again and get some video to share. Then if it has any import to someone, they could do more testing with it.
Maybe you should stop inhaling lead fumes. At no point would your lead have turned clear. Also if you pay attention in this video, he doesn’t make clear sodium, just a clear compound containing sodium (another one would be table salt, so I don’t really get his point) he then showed that if you make something thin enough you can see through it, which is barely less unimpressive.
@@KrizMo122 If you read what I said, I never said it was clear, just that it looked like it was. It very likely wasn't clear, but it sure appeared that it was. I'm sure too that as a child, I breathed alot of lead. It was in all the gas in every car and truck back then. Thanks for your concern of my health.
The colors forming on molten lead are thin films of its oxides and they appear when lead is overheated. One thing is also appearing when that happens, and that's copious amounts of lead fumes.
As a dumb high school senior back in 1970 I was in charge of our chemistry lab stockroom along with another friend. We were bored one day and starting playing with sodium. We rapidly moved on to seeing what would happen with a really BIG piece of sodium when thrown into water. Fortunately for us as it started to sizzle we moved back. The explosion threw hot molten sodium into the ceiling but didn’t explode the beaker. We could have been seriously injured. If we had done that today the FBI would have arrested us for domestic terrorism and our lives would have taken a very different path.
Haha)), When I was around six or seven my dad ( he's a chemist) brought home some sodium to show what chemistry is all about. We did a little comparison test of sodium contacting with ice cold and then boiling water... Let say there was a considerable difference))) Luckily we had some leftovers of the paint to cover the stains on the kitchen wall before mom got home.
When I was in grad school, my friends and I threw a chunk of sodium in the pool at my apartment complex. It exploded loudly. Somebody called the cops, so we got to practice the important skill of lying to cops. We got away with it.
@@herobrine1847 Nope. It happened in an empty room where our absent minded math teacher was grading papers. All he did was look up and say, “Hey! What’s going on there!”
i remember looking through the reflecting side of a 1 way mirror. they used them for security to watch people , at least they used to. looks like a regular mirror but someone on the other side can see through. if you get up really close you can also see through the shiny side to see the people behind it. did that once and heard the guy behind say yah i know you can see through.
its not a mirror and its not one way, its darkened glass, the reason it reflects like that is because the other side is very dark, with no lights allowed, and the other side is normally lit, this causes a bunch of stuff im too lazy to describe to happen and means the light reflected off the glass overpowers what little light is on the other side and is much more visible, if both sides were lit it would be as easy to see through as normal darkened windows
The easiest way to see a "transparent" metal is a good old CD: it's exactly the same kind of deposited aluminium or even gold in older/premium CD-Rs. All it matters is that it's reflective enough to infrared light.
Nice to see a good explanation of this. You get the same type of reaction with table salt when its heated up until its red hot. It will explode in a similar fashion, probably because there's not much there holding it together since its ionic and the water can intrude and make it unstable. And the term "columbic explosion" is maybe a bit over-exaggerated, at least for me. Its a reaction just like anything else. If you capture it before it explodes and stop the reaction, nothing interesting happens since its not molten anymore. Conversely, you can probably heat sodium oxide and sodium hydroxide in their pure states and make them explode in water the same way once they are molten.
@TheActionLab : Legend has it that Newton started studying spectroscopy by looking at the sun through a thin gold foil. Could @TheActionLab do a video looking through gold foil at the sun? Apollo moon suit have gold plated visors. Was this foil or vacuum-dep? My understanding is that in a foil the gold atoms are so close together they only allow blue wavelengths of light through.
Gold is extremely ductile, and can be rolled into extremely thin foil. You can see the Sun clearly though it, but the Sun looks green. :) The visors are definitely PVD, tho, not foil. The Newton story is likely apocryphal, and has nothing to do with spectroscopy. A sunlit glass of water on a table shows spectral dispersion; it is, and was in Newton's time, easy to spot randomly with many household glass things, if your sight is keen. :)
Before watching this, I am going to guess thin films. Because of metals' conductivity, by maxwell's equations you find that when a light wave enters a metal that the electric and magnetic field end up being shifted out of phase which causes a damping effect on the wave causing it to decay exponentially. This also means though that if the metal is thin enough you will still see light make its way through since it was not inside metal for long enough to complete damp out the wave.
i have seen this experiment a few years ago discovered independently by one russian chemistry channel and he could not find the answer why it happened, he discovered it by completely by accident. and now ofc its actionlab that gave the explanation😊
Germanium is infrared transparent for a good portion of the spectrum, but opaque in the visible light region. I think it's considered a metalloid and not a pure metal though, super interesting stuffs!
Salt is technically infrared transparent too! I've thought about how you could make/mill/grow a salt lens, but it's hygroscopic so you would need to coat it with above mentioned chemicals as a vapour barrier.
@@toxomanrod Most actual solid pieces of metal are actually good reflectors of infrared, germanium may have a metallic luster which makes it superficialy resemble a metal, but in reality it's actually a metalloid and not a true metal.
This is how those mirrored windows in interrogation rooms work. As it's dark in the observation room the light that pass through is easily seen while no light leak through to the bright side. 😁
This might be how they do it now, but in the past, it was done by dithering the metal atoms (like comic-book hatching) rather than a thin solid layer because it was easier to "spray" the atoms than to do deposition.
We had transparent aluminum windows in our MRAPs in Iraq. They were thinner and lighter than regular glass windows and still strong enough to take direct hits from most heavy weapons.
The "molten transparent sodium" myth is something Thunderf00t started, at my huge annoyance and unpleasant surprise. It's clearly sodium hydroxide being stable for a couple of seconds due to Leidenfrost effect. It can also be decanted into another dry container where it will solidify into a translucent, white mass that behaves identically to NaOH, so there is really no mystery about it. As far as I know, Thunderf00t issued a retraction of his claims, which is something I would not expect from a person of his caliber. As for transparent metal films, we've all seen mylar foils passing light through when we'd examine and play with candy wrappers. Gold leafs transmit blue-green light. Some thin metal films transmit ultraviolet radiation, as well, so they're used to make UV pass filters.
00:04 "I have done a lot of experiments with sodium in the past, but we usually focused on it exploding.." Yes, we have done a lot of explosions and i'm all in for it😂 But this is nice content too
You can see light trough some compact discs that don't have a image printed on the back, if you hold them against a strong source of light. As a unsupervised kid it was a way for me to look at the sun without getting blinded immediately.
Three common metal film objects you can see through are mirrored sunglasses, which have been around a LONG time, DVD and CD discs, and metal film gift wrap, which can make easy and cheap solar filters for projects.
This video is talking about Drude Model which is the topic i just learned in college few weeks ago. This clears lot of my confusion especially about the plasma frequencies and extinction coefficient. Thank you so much 🙏
When I tried to explain this method to someone about how you can marginal expand metal with slight integrity to be transparent parallel for light exposer to clear-metal. They were like, "its not some kind of essence!"🙄.
In costume-making we often need to make helmet visors to have a "one-way mirror" effect. We airbrush the inside of a plastic visor with a special laquer called "Alclad II Chrome" - It's just tiny metal particles suspended in a solvent. When applied the solvent evaporates and you are left with an extremely thin metal coating, very similar to your aluminium plate, and for some reason it is still transparent when viewed from the darker side, but from the well-lit side it is a perfect chrome mirror. It's a really cool effect and I don't understand the science behind it at all, your video reminded me of it.
In one of Thunderf00t's videos, he was showing a very small piece of sodium (could be potassium or NaK) becoming transparent. It's very unusual and baffling to see this effect on a big chunk.
Stopped watching that guy when he hopped onto the cringey "anti-sjw" trend in like 2014 or so. Same with many other popular skeptics, some of whom unfortunately turned full-on alt-right nutjobs. Like we can all agree, liberals bad, but the trend was cringe. Hope he's putting out better stuff these days. I liked his Elon Musk-debunking back in the day haha
In Star Trek 4, Mr Scott asks the computer to make transparent aluminum. Turns out that naturally occurring aluminum oxide is corundum, aka sapphire and ruby. Yet they aren’t metals in the material sense, even though we think of aluminum as always being one. Similarly, while tungsten is a metal, as tungsten carbide, it’s a ceramic. The differentiator is what we define as a metal vs another kind of atomic structure with different properties.
I believe the 1st take where that drop burned through the paper and exploded in the water below in the beaker is what happened to my father who as a kid got those (in)famous chemistry kits where he did the same test. Only in his case all the windows of the kitchen blew out . That was 75 years ago.
Ahhh! That's Da Way to do chemistry! Inorganic chemistry is never boring! 🪣+🩸+💧⇒🎉+🌋+🔥+🚒. I was once rolled into ER after getting a splash of strong HCl in my eye. Luckily, I knew to rush to the faucet and wash it with running water thoroughly. I ended up with a bad case of conjunctivitis but intact eye. That was 45 years ago. :) I always wore goggles after that, it hurt quite a lot for a couple days...
"So today were gonna talk about when sodium doesn't explode..." "so we actually end up with a crystal clear rock here that suddenly EXPLODES at the end"
I have seen this with plastic potato chip bags where if you hold it up against direct sunlight you can see through it ! They also use a similar metal depositing process and as a surprise to anyone if you remove the outer plastic they become cheap and kind of useful wires
It’s nice to finally get some visuals and a more clear explanation. So.. does this mean electrons have metallic luster? I mean… they are metallic luster. Like that anhydrous ammonia thing where the liquid becomes copper colored.
I’d like you to do a video on bendable glass , apparently back during the Roman or Greek times someone invented this and he was killed by the king who he had presented it to .Not clear why but I have heard they know how to do this today.
Hey, you described the explosion of alkaline metals in water correctly. Most people still say it is from the hydrogen gas, but the discovery of the electrical nature of the explosion is fairly recent, so many are probably still using old sources or memory for the info.
Makes me wonder if something along this line might be done with a thin layer of metal in the presence of a strong magnetic field, or by passing a current through it, maybe a pulsed or variable current with the proper resonance, to influence the free electrons to assume a state that would allow visible light to pass through.
It's too complex, you'd need a perfect simulation of the electron cloud of a piece of metal to begin to study how you would try and affect it to create a specific state which would allow for light to get through, and we don't have that, sadly, also the resonance frequencies of electrons are extremely high, much higher than we can generate, the lowest is 28 GHz due to the gyromagnetic ratio, it'll be a while until we get power-driven transparent metal.
0:50 That transparent bubble bursts, the moment I saw it form in this video, I recognised it. In my college days, I had an accident while playing with sodium and water. I put a big chunk of sodium in a relatively small amount of water and the transparent bubble formed, I got close to see it, then it bursts and a few parts of that hot sodium hit me in face and burnt my skin. I was this close to losing an eye because one of the hot sodium chunks hit me very close to my right eye. It's very dangerous.
those are the hazards that don’t really come across on TH-cam videos..sure, you see the sparks on video, but every tiny spec could cost your eyesight the safety warnings and disclaimers don’t really work either. i see a similar effect with laser videos (styropyro); people are just desensitised. "oh, a 5W Laser. That’s weak" even though a 5W laser is hundreds of times more powerful than anything eye-safe. then you have people ordering strong lasers online, waving them around to be as cool as the youtubers they saw on the interwebs, and then asking in forums when the new dark spot in their vision will go away. i didn’t realize how fucking terrifying even a 1.6W laser is until I got a laser cutter.
Hello their. My name is Emril Bennett and I am the main lead of the Eyeroll with the Bennetts family channel. We are working on a series of videos with our friend, in which we aim to help make science concepts more accessible to those with a variety of conditions. Thank you, for your always kind words and easy explanations of sometimes difficult concepts… you are one of the main TH-camrs who inspired me to take the leap into this subject, and video creation in general.
Reminds me of the Star Trek ‘The Voyage Home’ When Scotty said what about this material for the Whale Tank - Transparent Aluminum- . In 2009, Oxford scientists made headlines when they created the sci-fi material in the real world using a special laser - High Energy Pulse Laser
Like super thin gold leafs, it is used in infrared cameras. Gold is so malleable that you can make a sheet out of it with thickness of only one atom of it
After the first two caught fire they turned yellow and then transparent, but the last one you showed first turned blue and then caught fire, I'm curious whether it would still turn yellow and transparent afterwards but unfortunately we will never know as it fell through the paper and exploded :/ The most interesting experiments are those that produce results you did not expect.
I watch a lot of scienc chanels but most of the time i have some ide of whats going on but every time i come to your chanel i always seam to get amazed by some new concept and learn something new, absolutly amazing content!!
I don't know about beam splitters, since the mirror would distort part of the beam due to refraction, but I do know they use those on amusement parks and seedy hotels (the kind you pay by the hour) to spy on your neighbor's activities...
@@partciudgam8478 actually flat optical mirrors are made of metal without glass and they don't create refraction distortion but beam splitters on the other hand really don't use metal, you usually make a beam splitter by attaching two triangular prisms to eachother.
I had seen this with aluminium foil wraps. I would hold it up in front of my eyes, but still could see through it. Now I got the explanation about the internal working of the metals.
What about when you put some aluminium foil on the stove? Once it gets red hot, it becomes transparent then when it cools down, it's clear, as if the metal has been removed and left plastic film behind. 🤔
Crystallinie aluminum oxide is transparent. Normally, when you oxidize aluminum, it looks greyish, but that's because of the structure. The crystalline form is called corundum, and when there are certain metal impurities in it, the resulting colored rocks are known as rubies and sapphires.
Half silvered mirror has its silver(back) side 50%transparent. So you can see behind the mirror. (=half mirror / two way mirror, the mirrors direction depends on which side is more lit: it has the mirror while the shaded side is able to see through.
The thin layer of gold on the visors of Apollo astronauts was actually transparent such that it filtered out harmful infrared radiation but allowed visible light including green wavelength through.
Quite a few years ago, Canon had a camera with a pellicle mirror, which, of course, was glass with an aluminum coating. One third of the light was reflected to the viewfinder and the rest was transmitted through to the film. This is a pretty well known phenomenon. I get annoyed at some channels when they talk about transparent aluminum as though it was realistic at the macro level of thickness. I try to explain why we can’t have transparent metals and the ones that are touted as such are really ceramics.
To say it is not really a true metal any more is understating it: the sodium hydroxide is no more a metal than table salt is a metal. The only thing that feels remarkable here is that you started with a lump of metal and it became another substance while you were watching it through the flames. Fire is fun.
Many Americans own samples of transparent metal: if you have car windows with defoggers that don't have visible wires, they use an ultrathin coating of metal (often of gold, because of its corrosion resistance -- there's so little gold involved that the cost isn't prohibitive) as a resistance element to heat the glass. Additionally, a one-way mirror has a partially transmissive coating (usually of aluminum, these days) between two glass layers, and these partial mirrors are also used in things like the rangefinders of some old rangefinder type film cameras (even a few digitals) and in the light metering systems of Single Lens Reflex cameras. They even used to be applied to the front surface of sunglasses (back in the '80s). So, transparent metal is everywhere!
In 1986 Scotty gave the formula and process for transparent aluminum to an engineering and manufacturing company that was capable of transparency at 4" thick and many times stronger than steel just to get home.
@@FluxApex "Why, how do we know he didn't invent the thing?"
I watched this video just to make sure someone said this.
@@scrocrates6380 Me too So-Crates!
Slight correction - transparent aluminum was strong enough that a 1" thick sheet would withstand the same PSI as acrylic polymer 6" thick. Also, he only provided the molecular structure - the rest was for them to figure out.
And it had to be transparent so he could see the whales. Why not just use regular aluminum and a camera instead?
I love this channel. Some days it's like "here's a cool silly thing you can do with physics," then other days it's like "here's an explanation of fundamental concepts of matter and energy that you never really thought about and should probably be over your head but I'll explain it in a way that'll give you a solid layperson understanding that will make mundane things suddenly cooler."
And then "here's something dangerous 😀 " and proceeds to make something explode or break in some way you probably shouldn't try at home.
And sometimes he’s just wrong
@@zuccbucc4778 pobody's nerfect
what an odd way to spell layman
That was my favorite thing about this video. I was fascinated by the explanation of the behavior of electrons in metals and their interaction with external waves.
Most music compact disc (CDs) , despite their silver color, are also transparent enough to allow some light to pass through- which is evident in sunlight and with other bright light sources like lasers
Yes, they're translucent because the layer of aluminium underneath the label is very, very thin.
The secret they don't want you to know 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 👀
My friends and I viewed an annular solar eclipse through a CD one time. They thought I was a genius, haha, but I'd dimply noticed you can look at the sun through a CD when I was a kid. I viewed another partial solar eclipse through a CD a few years later. Works really good.
If I recall correctly, there are actually many more "transparent" metals. It's just that they are transparent in radiation ranges close to visible, but not in it. For example, Germanium is used to make lenses for thermal vision optic due to its infrared range transparency.
Also, germania (germanium dioxide) is used in visible range photography optics and as optical fibre cores.
Germanium is not a metal, but a semimetal/metalloid.
@@lajoswinkler Thats like saying aluminumoxide isnt a metal. You know exactly what is meant :D
@@jash21222 A glass can be a metall. Ever heard of metallic glass? Easy to Google and to look at. If you don't know stuff about metallic glass, maybe don't use that as an example.
Also, ever heard about the metallicity about stars? Is that about metals? No it's not always.
@@jash21222 please read my sentence again because I think you misunderstood what I meant. I meant and said that those exist, and by talking about metallic/metallicity, it's not always implied that the element talked about is a metal in on itself. No idea why you seem to be so angry over that, because that's just how it is. E.g. Metallicity of stars, metallic glass etc etc.
@@meloney That was the most stretched crock of bs. Impressive.
I was surprised that you did not mention that these semi transparent mirror have plenty of technical applications like interferometry, simultaneous projection and measurement, etc.
Strange that we usually don't see the alkali metals like sodium do that cool effect despite how commonly we see people adding the metals (especially sodium) into water.
Because people like explosion i guess
They usually don't put a coffee filter in it and the reaction is... violent.
I've seen it before a long time ago. And the guy didn't know how to explain the phenomenon.
I'm glad it is finally here.
NaOH and KOH are eagerly soluble in water, so much hydrophilic in fact that they crystallize from solution as hydrates, NaOH‧H2O, taking a molecule of water with them even to crystals. This is why you don't see the hydroxydes if you let metal float on top of water. This experiment is amazing! And quite dangerous if done carelessly, too, as it ends with molten caustic soda flying around at the very end-this stuff burns through skin faster that you could wash it.
This property is what allows 'one-way' mirrors to work. So, however, the amount of transmission is relative to how much light is present, which is why it's important for the room behind such a mirror to be dimly lit, or lit entirely by light transmitted through the mirror. One quirk of this is that if you cast a shadow on a one-way mirror, you can darken one part of it to the point where the transmission across both sides is about equal, and then actually peer past the mirror to see what's behind it.
Substances generally have the same transmittance, reflectance, and absorbance in all directions. The thing is that when the space on one of a pane of glass is very well lit compared to the other, enough light from the light side reflects off the pane to drown out the light that makes it through from the dark side. You can try this out with your own exterior windows at night: pick a window that looks out into a dark space and turn on all the lights in that room.
@@jdotoz Well yes, the absolute transmission, being what percentage of light makes it through, doesn't vary across either side, but the relative transmission does, since both sides are at different levels of illumination, thus one side is having more photons pass through it, simply because more light is shining on that side.
The simplest way to think about this is "signal to noise ratio"
If it's bright on your side, the amount of light reflected into your eyes showing the scene on your side (the "noise") overwhelms the transmitted view of the scene on the other side (the "signal"). As you vary the amount of reflected light, the amount of transmitted light doesn't change, but the ratio does.
I believe the correct term to use for the plastic film coated with the aluminum Oxide is translucent, not transparent. On the whole this was a very interesting video and educational. Thanks for sharing.
Right
??? Time stamp?
Fun fact that I learned recently: metals would be different colors if we could see UV. Basically, metals have electric field resonances...how quickly forces tend to be passed through the electron cloud. EM radiation of the resonant frequency will be absorbed. For most metals, the resonant frequency is somewhere in the UV range. Gold and copper are two of very few metals with a resonant frequency in the visible range (blue), hence they have color to us, instead of just looking grey / silver.
The fire brigade's fire protection clothing sometimes has a small window to look through. This is vapour-deposited with a few layers of gold atoms.
Why?
I had alot of lead, maybe 40-50 lb., from alot of things and desided to melt together and put into forms to be able to stack and store it better. In a lg. Iron kettle, I melted it and remove all the junk that floated on top, poured into the forms, but they ended up all with a curved bottom, so remelted it all again, and skimmed the top many times. It seemed to become clear but dark and was sure I could see the bottom of the kettle through it, but then a skin would form over the top, but reskimming, it would again appear clear. I'm sure there were some other metals in with it, tin and maybe silver or other low melt temp. metals. I tried sticking things like a wire into it and it looked like I could see them though it, but it was hard to say as the top was also a good mirror and putting to much light on it would increase that.
Discovery is so weird like that huh? I think we all probably discover something completely new in our lifetimes that has no current explanation. If you try I bet you could recreate it again
@@versag3776 At that time, about 20 years ago, I thought it must be a known thing, that I just didn't remember reading about it or missed, until this video. To bad that a few years ago I melted most of that down to add some new, but do have the a few pounds of that old stuff that I had cast into bullets for an old cannon I use to have and might be enough to test again and get some video to share. Then if it has any import to someone, they could do more testing with it.
Maybe you should stop inhaling lead fumes. At no point would your lead have turned clear. Also if you pay attention in this video, he doesn’t make clear sodium, just a clear compound containing sodium (another one would be table salt, so I don’t really get his point) he then showed that if you make something thin enough you can see through it, which is barely less unimpressive.
@@KrizMo122 If you read what I said, I never said it was clear, just that it looked like it was. It very likely wasn't clear, but it sure appeared that it was. I'm sure too that as a child, I breathed alot of lead. It was in all the gas in every car and truck back then. Thanks for your concern of my health.
The colors forming on molten lead are thin films of its oxides and they appear when lead is overheated. One thing is also appearing when that happens, and that's copious amounts of lead fumes.
As a dumb high school senior back in 1970 I was in charge of our chemistry lab stockroom along with another friend. We were bored one day and starting playing with sodium. We rapidly moved on to seeing what would happen with a really BIG piece of sodium when thrown into water. Fortunately for us as it started to sizzle we moved back. The explosion threw hot molten sodium into the ceiling but didn’t explode the beaker. We could have been seriously injured. If we had done that today the FBI would have arrested us for domestic terrorism and our lives would have taken a very different path.
Moshi moshi, FBI desu.
Did you get expelled
Haha)), When I was around six or seven my dad ( he's a chemist) brought home some sodium to show what chemistry is all about. We did a little comparison test of sodium contacting with ice cold and then boiling water...
Let say there was a considerable difference)))
Luckily we had some leftovers of the paint to cover the stains on the kitchen wall before mom got home.
When I was in grad school, my friends and I threw a chunk of sodium in the pool at my apartment complex. It exploded loudly. Somebody called the cops, so we got to practice the important skill of lying to cops. We got away with it.
@@herobrine1847 Nope. It happened in an empty room where our absent minded math teacher was grading papers. All he did was look up and say, “Hey! What’s going on there!”
i remember looking through the reflecting side of a 1 way mirror. they used them for security to watch people , at least they used to. looks like a regular mirror but someone on the other side can see through. if you get up really close you can also see through the shiny side to see the people behind it. did that once and heard the guy behind say yah i know you can see through.
that's why its better to put a tiny pinhole camera instead
@@monad_tcp except pinhole cameras are the tools of pervs and spies, not serious honest people who use these mirrors for security.
@@dannymoneywell bullshit, security is security
I always look through them
its not a mirror and its not one way, its darkened glass, the reason it reflects like that is because the other side is very dark, with no lights allowed, and the other side is normally lit, this causes a bunch of stuff im too lazy to describe to happen and means the light reflected off the glass overpowers what little light is on the other side and is much more visible, if both sides were lit it would be as easy to see through as normal darkened windows
Fascinating, but Scotty already gave us the formula for transparent aluminum on Star Trek decades ago.
I was thinking that whe I heard James talking about "transparent metals". 😁🤭
Transparent Aluuumiinum
@@blueredbrick Aye laddy.
That’s the ticket laddy!
Captain there be whales 🐋 . LoL 😂
I noticed this phenomenon when I looked at the sun through a CD. I always wondered how that worked. Thank you for explaining it.
The easiest way to see a "transparent" metal is a good old CD: it's exactly the same kind of deposited aluminium or even gold in older/premium CD-Rs. All it matters is that it's reflective enough to infrared light.
Mylar, which is sputtered aluminum on a polymer surface, is another version of a transparent metal. This is common for bags of chips or crisps
This is the secret they don't want you to know 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 👀
Nice to see a good explanation of this. You get the same type of reaction with table salt when its heated up until its red hot. It will explode in a similar fashion, probably because there's not much there holding it together since its ionic and the water can intrude and make it unstable. And the term "columbic explosion" is maybe a bit over-exaggerated, at least for me. Its a reaction just like anything else. If you capture it before it explodes and stop the reaction, nothing interesting happens since its not molten anymore. Conversely, you can probably heat sodium oxide and sodium hydroxide in their pure states and make them explode in water the same way once they are molten.
This is the secret they don't want you to know 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 👀
@@VeganSemihCyprus33 Watched it, learnt nothing new.
@@VeganSemihCyprus33 bot
@TheActionLab : Legend has it that Newton started studying spectroscopy by looking at the sun through a thin gold foil. Could @TheActionLab do a video looking through gold foil at the sun? Apollo moon suit have gold plated visors. Was this foil or vacuum-dep? My understanding is that in a foil the gold atoms are so close together they only allow blue wavelengths of light through.
Gold is extremely ductile, and can be rolled into extremely thin foil. You can see the Sun clearly though it, but the Sun looks green. :) The visors are definitely PVD, tho, not foil. The Newton story is likely apocryphal, and has nothing to do with spectroscopy. A sunlit glass of water on a table shows spectral dispersion; it is, and was in Newton's time, easy to spot randomly with many household glass things, if your sight is keen. :)
Before watching this, I am going to guess thin films. Because of metals' conductivity, by maxwell's equations you find that when a light wave enters a metal that the electric and magnetic field end up being shifted out of phase which causes a damping effect on the wave causing it to decay exponentially. This also means though that if the metal is thin enough you will still see light make its way through since it was not inside metal for long enough to complete damp out the wave.
i have seen this experiment a few years ago discovered independently by one russian chemistry channel and he could not find the answer why it happened, he discovered it by completely by accident. and now ofc its actionlab that gave the explanation😊
Wow! The Action Lab always thinks up of properties of materials that we never thought about!
Not exactly... in the 60's they used gold (still do) on an astronaut's helmet visor which stops solar radiation. 60 years ago.
@@FamilyMods I think by "we" he meant the audience of The Action Lab, not all of humanity.
@@theneonbop I'm just extending and sharing the knowledge...
transparent aluminum, that's the ticket laddy
@@FamilyMods 👍
Finally!
I've been asking for this experiment many times before. I even gave up.
Can't wait to watch it.
If memory serves, infrared cameras will sometimes use metal lenses - lenses that block visible light, but focus infrared light.
Germanium is infrared transparent for a good portion of the spectrum, but opaque in the visible light region. I think it's considered a metalloid and not a pure metal though, super interesting stuffs!
Not metal - typically gallium arsenide, zinc selenide, or germanium.
Salt is technically infrared transparent too! I've thought about how you could make/mill/grow a salt lens, but it's hygroscopic so you would need to coat it with above mentioned chemicals as a vapour barrier.
@@toxomanrod Most actual solid pieces of metal are actually good reflectors of infrared, germanium may have a metallic luster which makes it superficialy resemble a metal, but in reality it's actually a metalloid and not a true metal.
This is how those mirrored windows in interrogation rooms work. As it's dark in the observation room the light that pass through is easily seen while no light leak through to the bright side. 😁
It does leak through, but the reflection on the other side is much stronger. Same thing as stars vs daylight.
This might be how they do it now, but in the past, it was done by dithering the metal atoms (like comic-book hatching) rather than a thin solid layer because it was easier to "spray" the atoms than to do deposition.
We had transparent aluminum windows in our MRAPs in Iraq. They were thinner and lighter than regular glass windows and still strong enough to take direct hits from most heavy weapons.
That would be alumin*a*
@@1495978707 its actually ALON, i think its a aluminum magnesium ceramic
@@Sgt.HartmanALON = AL O N = ALuminum Oxy Nitride
0:40 That little "woah" there contains an emotion that's hard to put into words.
I found 3:47 to be even more complex an emotion
@@u1zha I would agree, but I can definitely identify a hint of "what's going on" and "wait it's gonna break the breaker no-"
The "molten transparent sodium" myth is something Thunderf00t started, at my huge annoyance and unpleasant surprise. It's clearly sodium hydroxide being stable for a couple of seconds due to Leidenfrost effect. It can also be decanted into another dry container where it will solidify into a translucent, white mass that behaves identically to NaOH, so there is really no mystery about it. As far as I know, Thunderf00t issued a retraction of his claims, which is something I would not expect from a person of his caliber.
As for transparent metal films, we've all seen mylar foils passing light through when we'd examine and play with candy wrappers. Gold leafs transmit blue-green light. Some thin metal films transmit ultraviolet radiation, as well, so they're used to make UV pass filters.
Everyone has some thing Aluminium sheets - CDs/DVDs etc! Light goes through those too.
00:04 "I have done a lot of experiments with sodium in the past, but we usually focused on it exploding.."
Yes, we have done a lot of explosions and i'm all in for it😂
But this is nice content too
Wow! I always wondered why sodium burns for a time, sits, and then pops/explodes, instead of explode right after they touch
Transparent aluminum is my favourite one of these, as it's applicable everywhere
That painting idea is so creative wtf!! It looks great too, I love the colors on the accretion disc.
You can see light trough some compact discs that don't have a image printed on the back, if you hold them against a strong source of light.
As a unsupervised kid it was a way for me to look at the sun without getting blinded immediately.
You don't go blind looking at the 🌞.
Three common metal film objects you can see through are mirrored sunglasses, which have been around a LONG time, DVD and CD discs, and metal film gift wrap, which can make easy and cheap solar filters for projects.
gold leaf is also transparent , even the fake copper/nickel based ones
Thanks for the consistent good content and for answering all the questions that I never thought of.
Wait a minute, I was sure that Mr. Scott shared the secrets of transparent aluminum with us when the Enterprise came back to get some whales.
This video is talking about Drude Model which is the topic i just learned in college few weeks ago. This clears lot of my confusion especially about the plasma frequencies and extinction coefficient. Thank you so much 🙏
We would love the reaction mechanism written and explained too !!
Thank you for sharing your experiments with us!
When you hold a piece of aluminum foil over a ligher and burn it it oxidizes and becomes a little bit transparent too. I used to to that as a kid.
When I tried to explain this method to someone about how you can marginal expand metal with slight integrity to be transparent parallel for light exposer to clear-metal. They were like, "its not some kind of essence!"🙄.
In costume-making we often need to make helmet visors to have a "one-way mirror" effect. We airbrush the inside of a plastic visor with a special laquer called "Alclad II Chrome" - It's just tiny metal particles suspended in a solvent.
When applied the solvent evaporates and you are left with an extremely thin metal coating, very similar to your aluminium plate, and for some reason it is still transparent when viewed from the darker side, but from the well-lit side it is a perfect chrome mirror. It's a really cool effect and I don't understand the science behind it at all, your video reminded me of it.
In one of Thunderf00t's videos, he was showing a very small piece of sodium (could be potassium or NaK) becoming transparent. It's very unusual and baffling to see this effect on a big chunk.
Stopped watching that guy when he hopped onto the cringey "anti-sjw" trend in like 2014 or so. Same with many other popular skeptics, some of whom unfortunately turned full-on alt-right nutjobs. Like we can all agree, liberals bad, but the trend was cringe. Hope he's putting out better stuff these days. I liked his Elon Musk-debunking back in the day haha
That 3d animation of how electrons flow through metal was really helpful
In Star Trek 4, Mr Scott asks the computer to make transparent aluminum. Turns out that naturally occurring aluminum oxide is corundum, aka sapphire and ruby. Yet they aren’t metals in the material sense, even though we think of aluminum as always being one. Similarly, while tungsten is a metal, as tungsten carbide, it’s a ceramic. The differentiator is what we define as a metal vs another kind of atomic structure with different properties.
I believe the 1st take where that drop burned through the paper and exploded in the water below in the beaker is what happened to my father who as a kid got those (in)famous chemistry kits where he did the same test. Only in his case all the windows of the kitchen blew out . That was 75 years ago.
I had one of those, lucky I survived.
Ahhh! That's Da Way to do chemistry! Inorganic chemistry is never boring! 🪣+🩸+💧⇒🎉+🌋+🔥+🚒. I was once rolled into ER after getting a splash of strong HCl in my eye. Luckily, I knew to rush to the faucet and wash it with running water thoroughly. I ended up with a bad case of conjunctivitis but intact eye. That was 45 years ago. :) I always wore goggles after that, it hurt quite a lot for a couple days...
Brilliant video - I’m sure many other people are now looking at that Star Trek film with the transparent aluminium holding tanks in a whole new light.
"So today were gonna talk about when sodium doesn't explode..."
"so we actually end up with a crystal clear rock here that suddenly EXPLODES at the end"
That was amazing man! Thanks for teaching us cool stuff man! Keep up the awesome work dude!
if you broadcast a vibrating magnetic or sound field during molten and cooling you can affect transparency and magentism as well
I have seen this with plastic potato chip bags where if you hold it up against direct sunlight you can see through it ! They also use a similar metal depositing process and as a surprise to anyone if you remove the outer plastic they become cheap and kind of useful wires
Have some mirror shades ? That's a common item using very thin layers of metal that we can see thru.
Interesting video, well presented with great props/demos.
A 700-atoms thin sheet of metal that lets intense points of light go through... Nice idea for a smart mirror or something like that
It’s nice to finally get some visuals and a more clear explanation. So.. does this mean electrons have metallic luster? I mean… they are metallic luster. Like that anhydrous ammonia thing where the liquid becomes copper colored.
Action Lab: See-through metals exist!
Me (before watching): Na
Me (after watching): OH
I’d like you to do a video on bendable glass , apparently back during the Roman or Greek times someone invented this and he was killed by the king who he had presented it to .Not clear why but I have heard they know how to do this today.
I have heard of this too. He was killed by the king as the king feared the new material would devalue gold. I am fascinated by it too
Hey, you described the explosion of alkaline metals in water correctly.
Most people still say it is from the hydrogen gas, but the discovery of the electrical nature of the explosion is fairly recent, so many are probably still using old sources or memory for the info.
Makes me wonder if something along this line might be done with a thin layer of metal in the presence of a strong magnetic field, or by passing a current through it, maybe a pulsed or variable current with the proper resonance, to influence the free electrons to assume a state that would allow visible light to pass through.
It's too complex, you'd need a perfect simulation of the electron cloud of a piece of metal to begin to study how you would try and affect it to create a specific state which would allow for light to get through, and we don't have that, sadly, also the resonance frequencies of electrons are extremely high, much higher than we can generate, the lowest is 28 GHz due to the gyromagnetic ratio, it'll be a while until we get power-driven transparent metal.
Sodium in water be like:
Burns
Burns
Burns
- Let me be clear.
Explodes
Imagine if this was used in buildings
Imagine the military applications
Walls that explode?
?
imagine raining
@@redshepard5306 exactly
0:50 That transparent bubble bursts, the moment I saw it form in this video, I recognised it. In my college days, I had an accident while playing with sodium and water. I put a big chunk of sodium in a relatively small amount of water and the transparent bubble formed, I got close to see it, then it bursts and a few parts of that hot sodium hit me in face and burnt my skin. I was this close to losing an eye because one of the hot sodium chunks hit me very close to my right eye. It's very dangerous.
those are the hazards that don’t really come across on TH-cam videos..sure, you see the sparks on video, but every tiny spec could cost your eyesight
the safety warnings and disclaimers don’t really work either.
i see a similar effect with laser videos (styropyro); people are just desensitised. "oh, a 5W Laser. That’s weak"
even though a 5W laser is hundreds of times more powerful than anything eye-safe.
then you have people ordering strong lasers online, waving them around to be as cool as the youtubers they saw on the interwebs, and then asking in forums when the new dark spot in their vision will go away.
i didn’t realize how fucking terrifying even a 1.6W laser is until I got a laser cutter.
I've seen that light passes through CDs. I think the metal foil is one whole peace especially on the writable ones, although I'm not entirely sure.
Yes, usually one or two really thin aluminium discs.
Usually aluminum is added via vapour deposition.
Hello their. My name is Emril Bennett and I am the main lead of the Eyeroll with the Bennetts family channel. We are working on a series of videos with our friend, in which we aim to help make science concepts more accessible to those with a variety of conditions. Thank you, for your always kind words and easy explanations of sometimes difficult concepts… you are one of the main TH-camrs who inspired me to take the leap into this subject, and video creation in general.
4:12 Scotty is upset he didn't get his cameo
I understood that reference. 😁
the sodium really said:
now let me be clear...
I swear to god i thought it said meals and got ready to say this.
Holographic Meatloaf: am I a joke to you?
Reminds me of the Star Trek ‘The Voyage Home’ When Scotty said what about this material for the Whale Tank - Transparent Aluminum-
. In 2009, Oxford scientists made headlines when they created the sci-fi material in the real world using a special laser - High Energy Pulse Laser
James: "Let's see what happens when it doesn't explode" Sodium: *explodes*
Sodium is very temperamental.
Like super thin gold leafs, it is used in infrared cameras. Gold is so malleable that you can make a sheet out of it with thickness of only one atom of it
awesome lesson, thank you.
Most solar filters for observing the Sun with telescopes are made this way.
After the first two caught fire they turned yellow and then transparent, but the last one you showed first turned blue and then caught fire, I'm curious whether it would still turn yellow and transparent afterwards but unfortunately we will never know as it fell through the paper and exploded :/
The most interesting experiments are those that produce results you did not expect.
I watch a lot of scienc chanels but most of the time i have some ide of whats going on but every time i come to your chanel i always seam to get amazed by some new concept and learn something new, absolutly amazing content!!
At 5:15, isn't that what half silvered mirrors are? Like the ones used in beam splitters?
Great video as always! 👍👍
I don't know about beam splitters, since the mirror would distort part of the beam due to refraction, but I do know they use those on amusement parks and seedy hotels (the kind you pay by the hour) to spy on your neighbor's activities...
@@partciudgam8478 actually flat optical mirrors are made of metal without glass and they don't create refraction distortion but beam splitters on the other hand really don't use metal, you usually make a beam splitter by attaching two triangular prisms to eachother.
Don't quote me, but I believe Germanium is at least very translucent in the infrared spectrum.
Be careful with that laser pointer. A lot of green/blue/purple laser pointers are significantly higher power than the 5mW it probably says it is.
He absolutely knows this.
Go whine to your boyfriend.
I had seen this with aluminium foil wraps. I would hold it up in front of my eyes, but still could see through it.
Now I got the explanation about the internal working of the metals.
But don't forget it could be a compound material that actually was semi-transparent, some wrapping foils are made in such manner
Thanks bud! Love your content!❤
5:30 You can take it one step further and build a Fabry-Perot interferometer.
What about when you put some aluminium foil on the stove? Once it gets red hot, it becomes transparent then when it cools down, it's clear, as if the metal has been removed and left plastic film behind. 🤔
Crystallinie aluminum oxide is transparent. Normally, when you oxidize aluminum, it looks greyish, but that's because of the structure. The crystalline form is called corundum, and when there are certain metal impurities in it, the resulting colored rocks are known as rubies and sapphires.
Plastic film. LOL!
Riiight... you got aluminum red hot and when it cooled down plastic is left behind.... lol
This is really cool! It all sounds so straightforward, but there’s really a lot to absorb.
I thought you could do that with just a regular mirror. Does it have to be this ultra-thin aluminum?
If your counting sodium hydroxide as a transparent metal then table salt and maybe even glass are transparent metals
Is this the same as a "half silvered mirror" often used in optics?
Half silvered mirror has its silver(back) side 50%transparent. So you can see behind the mirror. (=half mirror / two way mirror, the mirrors direction depends on which side is more lit: it has the mirror while the shaded side is able to see through.
The thin layer of gold on the visors of Apollo astronauts was actually transparent such that it filtered out harmful infrared radiation but allowed visible light including green wavelength through.
Thunderf00t has some AMAZING slow speed footage of this stuff. Edit, this is also why it will turn your skin into soap.
It's hardly a metal if it's sodium hydroxide - metals need to be metallically bonded lattices of ions and free electrons.
Could one quickly harvest and store the clear resulting hydroxide before it pops?
It's molten, as it cools down it'll just form a polycrystal, so an opaque chunk of NaOH
I like your definition of "non explosive"
"Usually we put the sodium in water to see it explode"
*puts sodium in water
"look it's perfectly clear"
*sodium explodes
Wow! Amazing! First time I saw this was in Thunderfoot's video years back! Now it's much more clear here! Amazing!
Oh man. I am using the Drude formula in my thesis and this was really on my mind. Are there any transparent metals? Yes! (but...)
Quite a few years ago, Canon had a camera with a pellicle mirror, which, of course, was glass with an aluminum coating. One third of the light was reflected to the viewfinder and the rest was transmitted through to the film. This is a pretty well known phenomenon. I get annoyed at some channels when they talk about transparent aluminum as though it was realistic at the macro level of thickness. I try to explain why we can’t have transparent metals and the ones that are touted as such are really ceramics.
Thanks! Through your experiments, we’re able to witness phenomena we’d never be able to perform in our homes. Cheers to science and your dedication!
Adding a bit of hydrogen and carbon to silicon we get silicone which is transparent and doesn't explode!
Bro you uploaded exactly on December 1 on my time
To say it is not really a true metal any more is understating it: the sodium hydroxide is no more a metal than table salt is a metal. The only thing that feels remarkable here is that you started with a lump of metal and it became another substance while you were watching it through the flames. Fire is fun.
This is fascinating to witness. Seems like your experiments have gradually become better as time passes. May God bless everyone here.
I love how God made the Universe so interesting and fun to play with!
Many Americans own samples of transparent metal: if you have car windows with defoggers that don't have visible wires, they use an ultrathin coating of metal (often of gold, because of its corrosion resistance -- there's so little gold involved that the cost isn't prohibitive) as a resistance element to heat the glass. Additionally, a one-way mirror has a partially transmissive coating (usually of aluminum, these days) between two glass layers, and these partial mirrors are also used in things like the rangefinders of some old rangefinder type film cameras (even a few digitals) and in the light metering systems of Single Lens Reflex cameras. They even used to be applied to the front surface of sunglasses (back in the '80s).
So, transparent metal is everywhere!