"Wil McCarthy - The Technetium Rush" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

drink your troubles away.тАЭ

But the comment must have struck a chord. May have, I meant to say,
because what happened next was passing strange and canтАЩt be definitely linked to
Rakesh Solanki in any way. The paperтАЩs solicitor is standing over me as I write this,
making sure I donтАЩt commit libel. Well, like I say, nobodyтАЩs calling the man a
criminal. Just very, improbably lucky.

****

Imagine youтАЩre an unknown scientist in a backwater town, and your
wifeтАФwho makes more money than youтАФis publishing poetry. How do you feed
your own ego and reassure yourself you still wear the family trousers? By publishing
scientific papers, of course. This isnтАЩt easy to do; it takes weeks to write one, and
even a minor journal like South Asia Geology Review turns away most of what it
receives. If youтАЩre lucky and the journal editors see promise in your work, it can then
take months or even years to get the niggling details just right. For a professor with a
gaggle of students at his beck this is perhaps no big deal, but itтАЩs enough to drive a
lone man to drink and to drive a drinking man to despair. Rooting around in an
online database, I could only find three papers by Solanki, with hints that he might
have published two more.

But hereтАЩs where it gets interesting, because while two of these papers are
about alluvial minerals in the Malpura clay, the third one is entitled, тАЬPossible
Economic Uses for Purified Reactor Waste.тАЭ Now, it isnтАЩt strange for a man to have
such ideas, who spends his days burying the poison churned out by his wifeтАЩs
employer. Indeed, AbhaтАФwith a knowledge of physics and chemistry
complementary to RockyтАЩs ownтАФmay have provided some of the inspiration
herself. But it chucks a spanner in the otherwise-functional tale of rags to
well-deserved riches because it tips the Solanki hand four years prematurely. It was a
minor paper in a minor journal; safe to hope no one would remember it there. Ah,
but this is the information age, when nothing but nothing is ever truly forgotten.

LetтАЩs roll back a moment here and take a look at the stuff that put Solanki
where he is today. Technetium is a white and very shiny metal, similar to platinum,
although itтАЩs subject to oxidation and will turn gray and powdery if you bake it long
enough. It has the eleventh-highest melting point of any element, and its eight
neighbors on the periodic chart have all been used to strengthen, harden, and
stabilize steel and other alloys, including the tungsten filaments of incandescent
lightbulbs, which were still common at the time of SolankiтАЩs writing. Four of the
neighbors are also colorful additives in glazes and dyes, suggesting a variety of uses
for that rarest of birds, technetium, if only people could be gotten interested in it.
More importantly, as a so-called beta emitter, it generates a slight but constant
electric current, which prevents other metals from corroding. тАЬAs a hardener and
surface treatment,тАЭ wrote Rocky, тАЬour friend is simply unmatched.тАЭ

He even goes so far as to suggestтАФand this is no speculation on my
part!тАФthat a technetium alloy cut with gold and palladium would be perfect for
high-value coinage. тАЬHard, bright, untarnishable and rare, it would be the
numismatistтАЩs answer to diamond, for such a coin might last nearly forever.тАЭ