“The substance itself is light-years ahead of glass,”

He’s not using light-years as a measure of distance or time but /technological progress/.

There aren’t any units for that, or any firm measure for it, but in modernistic thought, we tend to think that technology gets better as time goes on — thus “years” might be an acceptable measure of progress — being a measure of time.

What doesn’t fit is light-years. I can’t imagine any way to measure technological progress in terms of distance.

There’s also the fact that what he said, with the word ‘light’ removed drops to the level of the fundamentally obvious — of /course/ it’s more advanced than glass. Glass has been in use for hundreds of years.

A better sound bite might have been “This material is years ahead of even the most modern applications of glass.” Which would at least have left the poor guy sounding a little more educated.

As an aside, I /have/ read a book in less than two hundred miles — I was on a car trip at the time.

By “hand”, I rather mean available energy levels for its electrons. The molecule needs to have a particular energy level available to it in order to “catch” a particular frequency range of light. The formation of chemical bonds affects the energy levels that are available to each atom.

Of course, reality is more complicated than this, but this should be enough to get the basic idea across. If you investigate it much deeper, you are likely to find yourself studying a subject called Quantum Electrodynamics, or QED.

I imagine not very well. You’re thinking the durability and it being a ceramic, right? I think it’ probably still fairly heavy in comparison to shuttle tiles. About half the weight of glass for this new stuff? I’m not certain on the details, but glass is pretty heavy stuff, and shuttle tile material is interspersed with air to help with the weight and thermal mass issues.

Oh and one more nitpicky thing, alumina is Al2O3, not AlO3…

Thanks for the explanation. Now you know why I’m a mechanical engineer instead of a chemist

Looks to me like the pyramid (with the eye in it) is clear and transparent………there is nothing new under the Sun…. :*)

Yeah right George!

As for the light year thing, I think its well established that its a bad application of the term, but if you see product development in terms of a race against competition, a distance based metaphor isn’t entirely out of line…so y’all stop floggin’ that poor dead horse or I’m calling PETA!!

Since we’re all being so pedantic, that should be “fewer” calories. (I read a book on grammar in only two parsecs.)

Or maybe he was referring to relativistic distance contraction, i.e. he travelled so fast that the distance contracted to less than 12 parsecs.

No? Oh, well, never mind.