SPOILERS - don't read unless you've read the book:
I read the book earlier this year and I loved it. One thing I had been thinking about though was the carbon nanotube wire and the ship.
Single-atom-thick wires used as knives have shown up in science-fiction before. In Ringworld, for example, a character is decapitated when they run into a nano-wire strung across a path.
In The Three Body Problem, I don't think you could ever 'cut' metal like that with carbon nanotubes - you'd have to overcome the cumulative bonding energies of all of those iron atoms in the ship and I doubt even the ship's engines running at full blast could push hard enough to do that. And that's assuming that a string of nanotubes has the strength to resist all of that tension. Apparently carbon nanotubes can resist about 100000N of tensile force (about a 10000kg weight in earth's gravity), so perhaps it wouldn't break - but I doubt that the metal in the ship would cleave, either.
Is there anyone who knows more about chemistry/solid state physics/materials science to comment?
I read the book earlier this year and I loved it. One thing I had been thinking about though was the carbon nanotube wire and the ship.
Single-atom-thick wires used as knives have shown up in science-fiction before. In Ringworld, for example, a character is decapitated when they run into a nano-wire strung across a path.
In The Three Body Problem, I don't think you could ever 'cut' metal like that with carbon nanotubes - you'd have to overcome the cumulative bonding energies of all of those iron atoms in the ship and I doubt even the ship's engines running at full blast could push hard enough to do that. And that's assuming that a string of nanotubes has the strength to resist all of that tension. Apparently carbon nanotubes can resist about 100000N of tensile force (about a 10000kg weight in earth's gravity), so perhaps it wouldn't break - but I doubt that the metal in the ship would cleave, either.
Is there anyone who knows more about chemistry/solid state physics/materials science to comment?