What does this operationalize as? Presumably not that if we load a bone and a diamond rod under equal pressures, the diamond rod breaks first? Is it more about if we drop sudden sharp weights onto a bone rod and a diamond rod, the diamond rod breaks first? I admit I hadn’t expected that, despite a general notion that diamond is crystal and crystals are unexpectedly fragile against particular kinds of hits, and if so that modifies my sense of what’s a valid metaphor to use.
As an physicist who is also an (unpublished) SF author, if I was trying to describe an ultimate nanoengineered physically strong material, it would be a carbon-carbon composite, using a combination of interlocking structures made out of diamond, maybe with some fluorine passivization, separated by graphene-sheet bilayers, building a complex crack-diffusing structure to achieve toughness in ways comparable to the structures of jade, nacre, or bone. It would be not quite as strong or hard as pure diamond, but a lot tougher. And in a claw-vs-armor fight, yeah, it beats anything biology can do with bone, tooth, or spider silk. But it beats it by less than an order of magnitude, far less that the strength ratio between a covalant bond to a van der Vaals bond (or even somewhat less than to a hydrogen bond). Spider silk actually gets pretty impressively close to the limit of what can be done with C-N covariant bonds, it’s a very fancy piece of evolved nanotech, with a different set of anti-crack tricks. Now, flesh, that’s pretty soft, but it’s primarily evolved for metabolic effectiveness, flexibility, and ease of growth rather than being difficult to bite through: gristle, hide, chitin, or bone spicules get used when that’s important.
But yes, if I was giving a lecture to non-technical folks where “diamond is stronger than flesh-and-bone” was a quick illustrative point rather then the subject of the lecture, I might not bother to mention that, unless someone asked “doesn’t diamond shatter easily?”, to which the short answer is “crystaline diamond yes, but nanotech can and will build carbon-carbon composites out of diamond that don’t”.
I see the appeal of using “static cling” as a metaphor to non-technical folks, but it is something of an exaggeration for hydrogen bonds—that’s significantly weaker van der Vaals bonds. “Glue” might be a fairer analogy than “static cling”. The non-protein-chain bonds in biology that are the weak links that tend to fail when flesh tears are mostly hydrogen bonds, and the quickest way to explain that to someone non-technical would be “the same sort of bonds that hold ice together”. So the proportionate analogy is probably “diamond is a lot harder than ice, and the way the human body is built, outside of a few of the strongest bits like bones, teeth and sinews, is basically held together mostly by the same sort of weakish bonds that hold ice together”.
What does this operationalize as? Presumably not that if we load a bone and a diamond rod under equal pressures, the diamond rod breaks first? Is it more about if we drop sudden sharp weights onto a bone rod and a diamond rod, the diamond rod breaks first? I admit I hadn’t expected that, despite a general notion that diamond is crystal and crystals are unexpectedly fragile against particular kinds of hits, and if so that modifies my sense of what’s a valid metaphor to use.
As an physicist who is also an (unpublished) SF author, if I was trying to describe an ultimate nanoengineered physically strong material, it would be a carbon-carbon composite, using a combination of interlocking structures made out of diamond, maybe with some fluorine passivization, separated by graphene-sheet bilayers, building a complex crack-diffusing structure to achieve toughness in ways comparable to the structures of jade, nacre, or bone. It would be not quite as strong or hard as pure diamond, but a lot tougher. And in a claw-vs-armor fight, yeah, it beats anything biology can do with bone, tooth, or spider silk. But it beats it by less than an order of magnitude, far less that the strength ratio between a covalant bond to a van der Vaals bond (or even somewhat less than to a hydrogen bond). Spider silk actually gets pretty impressively close to the limit of what can be done with C-N covariant bonds, it’s a very fancy piece of evolved nanotech, with a different set of anti-crack tricks. Now, flesh, that’s pretty soft, but it’s primarily evolved for metabolic effectiveness, flexibility, and ease of growth rather than being difficult to bite through: gristle, hide, chitin, or bone spicules get used when that’s important.
But yes, if I was giving a lecture to non-technical folks where “diamond is stronger than flesh-and-bone” was a quick illustrative point rather then the subject of the lecture, I might not bother to mention that, unless someone asked “doesn’t diamond shatter easily?”, to which the short answer is “crystaline diamond yes, but nanotech can and will build carbon-carbon composites out of diamond that don’t”.
I see the appeal of using “static cling” as a metaphor to non-technical folks, but it is something of an exaggeration for hydrogen bonds—that’s significantly weaker van der Vaals bonds. “Glue” might be a fairer analogy than “static cling”. The non-protein-chain bonds in biology that are the weak links that tend to fail when flesh tears are mostly hydrogen bonds, and the quickest way to explain that to someone non-technical would be “the same sort of bonds that hold ice together”. So the proportionate analogy is probably “diamond is a lot harder than ice, and the way the human body is built, outside of a few of the strongest bits like bones, teeth and sinews, is basically held together mostly by the same sort of weakish bonds that hold ice together”.