Metals Fuse Together in Space
spacecentre.nz
spacecentre.nz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(spacecraft)#Galileo_e...
Those probes were created and launched a few years before I joined the company. I was a new employee when Hughes was producing the Galileo probe and my role was minor.
I spent 35 years with the company -- the last half with Boeing, who acquired it from GM around the year 2001. For the most part, it was my dream job and I really enjoyed working with the best and brightest people.
> "Some of them are visibly fused. Some idiot must have welded them.”
> “Welded, yes. But not by some idiot. By the sun.”
> “Leo, it doesn’t get that hot—”
> “Not directly. What you’re seeing is spontaneous vacuum diffusion welding. Metal molecules are evaporating off the surfaces of the pieces in the vacuum. Slowly, to be sure, but it’s a measurable phenomenon. On the clamped areas they migrate into their neighboring surfaces and eventually achieve quite a nice bond. A little faster for the hot pieces on the sun side, a little slower for the cold pieces in the shade—but I’ll bet some of those clamps have been in place for twenty years.”
-- Falling Free (1988) by Lois McMaster Bujold
I’m down to correct that strange oversight, do you recommend that novel as a decent starting point? If that quote is representative it seems right up my street!
The series is pretty full of sci-fi ideas and real application of them and exploration of their consequences though. I don't mean to imply it's sf in name only but really fantasy with search & replace.
It's a bit hard to pick a single first book to suggest, because while most of the series centers around a particular character Miles Vorkosigan, the first book I would suggest takes place a bit earlier and centers around his parents.
And then yet another difficulty is that book is a sequel to another, and it's hard to recommend not reading those two in order, even if I think the 2nd is the real heart and soul and spirtitual kicking-off point of the whole thing. And this is already including the fact that I'm already not being a slave to chronology, already skipping over some other prequels that really don't need to be read in order at all. They are hundreds of years earlier and do not need to be read in any particular order. It's just these two where, the real choice gem and spritual kicking-off-point of the whole thing in my opinion happens to be a close sequel to another that, IF you read the 2nd and liked it, then it it hurts the 1st a little to have to then read that after.
So I want to say Barrayar, but it is such a close sequel to Shards of Honor, that it should really be Shards of Honor. And really, it's not like Shards is weak. It's great. Very in-line with the rest in tone and quality. It is pretty much as good as any other as a litmus test for if you will like the rest.
The progression goes like, Shards is great and is I think a good place to start reading the whole thing, but Barrayar that comes next is even better, and BOTH of those still aren't even centered around Miles yet, who is the center of most of the rest. So it starts off great, gets better, and then better again, and yet I don't really think it would be great to start with one of the Miles books, even if you are testing to see if you maybe don't even care for the style or the series in general. Test a whole series without spending any time with that series main character???? Yeah. Well that's why I say a bit hard to pick a suggestion ;)
I guess I can say it this way: It's definitely safe that if you did like Shards that you then somehow won't like all the Miles books. The trasition to to following Miles around won't be like "Wtf is this crap? My good series went bad!" And it's pretty safe that if you did not like Shards, that the others aren't different enough that you would love them and miss out by a false negative impression from Shards.
Shards of Honor.
From context, I think some word-logic got reversed during the text-editing process here. I assume you meant: "It's safe to say that if you liked Shards the other books won't disappoint."
IMO the decision to skip to The Warrior's Apprentice should really hinge on how much you care about (A) knowing world-building and backstory and (B) getting references/jokes to the earlier novels.
I think Cordelia’s Honour as mentioned above seems a decent omnibus?
It was fascinating reading your thought process and I love to answer questions this way especially about literature but I have to mask my adhd and never know when I am being too much so I err on the side of brevity, so I really enjoyed reading you formulate your opinion!
1. Cordelias' Honor: Unusually, this is not about the character who will star in the next umpteen novels, but it does a lot of world-building and introduces some important characters who will be pervasive supporting cast later. (It's an omnibus that merges what was originally published separately: Shards of Honor, Aftermath, Barrayar.)
2. The Warrior's Apprentice: The first of the books focusing on the main protagonist of the rest of the series, however if you value knowing the world-building, backstories, and references to earlier books, then this would be a weaker start.
3. Falling Free: A stand-alone novel 200 years earlier in the main universe, which can be good or bad depending on your appetite.
Honorable mention: The Curse of Chalion if you prefer fantasy. [0]
_________
[0] There's also The Sharing Knife series which is... I dunno, fantasy of the hinted-post-apocalyptic variety? Somehow I was never drawn into those, in my dim memory they were disappointing.*
I know they make sure that all the workers suit up to prevent oil from skin ruining any chance at a high vacuum.
That would keep the moisture out, but not asphyxiate anyone.
"Autonomous healing of fatigue cracks via cold welding" (2023) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06223-0 :
> [...] However, unexpectedly, cracks were also observed to heal by a process that can be described as crack flank cold welding induced by a combination of local stress state and grain boundary migration. The premise that fatigue cracks can autonomously heal in metals through local interaction with microstructural features challenges the most fundamental theories on how engineers design and evaluate fatigue life in structural materials. We discuss the implications for fatigue in a variety of service environments.
..
https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/maintenance--repair/im... :
> Cold weld is a common – although incorrect – term used to describe the process of using filled epoxy glue to repair broken metal machinery components. The product is a combination of a plastic resin compound and finely powdered steel. A catalyst, or hardener, is added to this mixture to cause a chemical reaction, which hardens the putty into a solid mass
..
Cold spraying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_spraying
"So you have 2 pieces of metal pressed together. How does an atom know which piece it belongs to?"
Oh. I know there's more to it than that, but that unblocked my understanding of it.
Even if you are dealing with atomically smooth surfaces, you'll get a grain boundary which is still a kinetic barrier, and a large grain boundary too.
That being said, your friend's point is still fundamentally valid - why wouldn't an atom on occasion cross the boundary and switch sides?
Optically flat polished metals, such as guage blocks, will form a few metallic bonds when pressed together.
This process is also known as diffusion bonding.
“The reason for this unexpected behavior is that when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to ‘know’ that they are in different pieces of copper. When there are other atoms, in the oxides and greases and more complicated thin surface layers of contaminants in between, the atoms ‘know’ when they are not on the same part.”
Chopping up the asteroid left as an exercise for the reader.
Let's do it with rhombododecahedra.
Why doesn’t it do it on earth? Is it the air in the way?
I don't think this is cold welding but I could be wrong.
The real news is that metals don't fuse together on Earth.
And how often have my glassware stuck together after I stacked them up?
So atoms in metal share electrons.
I hear that's like a plasma (floaty electrons, conductive)
So is metal a solid plasma?
But a solid is not a plasma, as by definition a plasma also has properties of a gas. So a solid metal is not a plasma even if they share some properties. In other words, a plasma is not a solid, and so "solid plasma" is a kind of an oxymoron.
To really drive the point... any metal can be in either the solid or plasma states, so thinking of them as "solid plasmas" isn't really correct.
They have similarities such as you mentioned but only at relatively low energies.
There are several sorts of plasmas. An ionized gas is a sort of plasma, also called thin plasma.
Thin plasmas, while physically different from a metal, share a surprisingly large number of properties with it:
They both have two separate charge carriers, cations and electrons. On both, the cations have a negligible contribution to current and the electrons form a gas. They have similar dispersion relations (leading to similar "local" Ohm's law in both). It's because cations don't contribute much that they seem similar, in spite of one being a gas and the other a solid.
You may enjoy this physics stack overflow thread for an expanded answer:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/717274/how-is-a-...
To prevent it we wither ensure a reasonable gap (if possible). Which has serious impacts on heat transfer. Or use dissimilar materials to prevent it from happening.
How long does the process take?
I'm wondering if there's an application as a self-destruction mechanism on a lock or something like that. There's still far easier methods.
There's a process in optics called "optical contacting" where you take two super-flat surfaces, push them together, and they stick. This is used in some specialized components where there can be no gap or optical adhesive at the interface. The pieces really do stick together. With optics, you don't have to worry about the materials oxidizing at the surface.
Also if you break a rod in space, you'd better be holding on to both pieces. ;-)
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