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Serious question: why on Earth would someone want to produce such compounds? Are there any actual applications of this work?
by tener 10y ago
Serious question: why on Earth would someone want to produce such compounds? Are there any actual applications of this work?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoPer the old Cave Johnson quote, "Science isn't about WHY. It's about WHY NOT." As for applications - military, civil engineering, maybe even rocketry.
- digi_owl 10y agoMilitary and rockets goes hand in hand. They are always on the lookout for something that produce a bigger boom, but that is stable enough for grunts to handle right after basic.
- erikb 10y agoI have to agree with the previous commenter, but in a more serious fashion. It's not just about the fun. A lot of modern technology is possible not because someone did some directed research but because someone thought about if something could be done and how to achieve it. Sometimes it may even take generations before a small piece of knowledge suddenly finds an application, and then it can still lead to breakthroughs. Certainly not all, but some people need to be able to do things without apparent meaning, including artists and (theoretical) scientists.
- marz0 10y agoOne simple example is the invention of styrofoam, which was accidentally created [1] when the inventor was looking to produce a flexible electrical insulator. [1] http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/styrofoam_2.htm http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/styrofoam_2...
- digi_owl 10y agoAnother, from physics, is the laser. It sat around for a decade or more before it was applied to telecom and such.
- xg15 10y agoCave Cohnson puts it nicely, but to add some more detail, I think a lot of that research was motivated by rocket science (the actual one). Suppose you want to increase the vertical speed of your rocket. If you just put in bigger engines and a larger fuel tank, you wouldn't have won anything: Sure the engines will provide more force, but you also increased the mass that the force has to move. What you actually want is a more efficient fuel that gives you more power for the (approximately) same mass - you quite literally want more bang for your buck. Because the required forces and mass constraints are so extreme, the number of possible fuels that are efficient enough for your purposes are quite limited - they are commonly known as "explosives". As rockets with more cargo space are needed, so grows the need for even more efficient fuels - driving the development of compounds that are even more hellishly explosive than their predecessors.
- Bartweiss 10y agoMany of Lowe's 'Things I Won't Work With' entries (or the explosive ones at least) show up in Ignition! as rocket fuel attempts. Even the ones that are utterly idiotic like ClF3, which will happily light asbestos on fire. A lot of the things people make turn out to be useless, but the dream of a quality rocket fuel (high energy, dense, hard to trigger) keeps things going.
- gozur88 10y agoFrom what I can tell there are all sorts of ways to produce highly energetic, unstable compounds, which are mostly curiosities. But if you can find a highly energetic stable compound it has all sorts of industrial and scientific uses.
- ealloc 10y agoFollow the money: "This work was supported by the Army Research Office (ARO) in the form of a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) (grant number: W911NF-13-1-0387)" -- from the acknowledgements of the paper.