I've been getting really into pocket knives this week, and especially learning about knife steels. The biggest surprise has been that one of the several aspects of Atlas Shrugged that caused me to lose suspension of disbelief, has become much more believable in retrospect:
When I read it I felt like this whole part about the "guy invents a new metal that's just straightforwardly better than existing metals, and names it after himself" was just too farfetched.
But it turns out that actually this is just a thing that can happen. This guy Larrin Thomas basically straight-up did this with a knife steel alloy in 2021. The alloy is notably better than others for the purposes of pocket knives in almost every respect. Like, in any single dimension there are steels that do better, but this alloy is like the Hawaii of the knife steel Pareto frontier. He didn't name it after himself but I think he could have called it "Larrin Metal" if he had wanted to. He actually called it "Magnacut".
JP Addison likes this.
JP Addison
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •I guess my intuition is that alloys would be "smooth" in their properties. You add more chromium and certain properties increase. Maybe they stop increasing or start reversing after a while, but it's not hard to find the optional points for each property over time.
With that intuition it seems surprising that it's hard to find new alloys that haven't already been found.
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to JP Addison • •Yeah I agree but apparently this is counteracted by some other factors.
My guess is that it's some combination of:
- It's actually pretty expensive to test a given alloy: it takes some nontrivial resources to get the metals to even dissolve properly. Various "super steels" have been invented since the 60s when "powder metallurgy" was invented.
- It's a moderately high dimensional space; you can alter the amount of carbon, chromium, vanadium, nickel, molybdenum, etc. independently
- Once you have the right chemical ratio, there's also the step of figuring out what the properties actually are: you need to experiment with different heat treatments, which is also surprisingly high dimensional (it seems fairly typical to have about 3 different stages of heat treatment at different temperatures in order to dial in the right crystal structure).
- I think the reward for experimentation is fairly slow to arrive, since your customers are themselves usually big companies with lots of momentum in what steels they use, and weird institutional incentives (maybe
... show moreYeah I agree but apparently this is counteracted by some other factors.
My guess is that it's some combination of:
JP Addison likes this.