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Nisan comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong
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-Kirill Yeskov, The Last Ringbearer, trans. Yisroel Markov
Context, please?
Mithril is described as an alloy with near-miraculous properties, produced in ancient times, which cannot be reproduced nowadays, despite the best efforts of modern metallurgy. The book is a work of fiction.
Alternatively, mithril is aluminum, almost unobtainable in ancient times and thus seen as miraculous. Think about that the next time you crush a soda can.
(belated...)
Incidentally, in many cases modern armor is made of aluminum, because aluminum (being less rigid) can dissipate more energy without failing. A suit of chain mail made of aircraft-grade aluminum would seem downright magical a few centuries ago.
Aluminum was entirely unobtainable in ancient times, I believe. It fuses with carbon as well as oxygen, so there was no way to refine it. And it would have made terrible armor, being quite a lot softer than steel. It also suffers from fatigue failures much more easily than steel. These are some of the reasons it makes a bad, though cheap, material for bikes.
Pure aluminum can be found without reducing it yourself, but it's very rare. You'd have to pluck it out of the interior of a volcano or the bottom of the sea- and so it seems possible that some could end up in the hands of a medieval smith, but very unlikely.
Oh, I don't know, one would say the same thing about meteoritic iron, and yet there are well documented uses of it.
(Although apparently the Sword of Attila wasn't really meteoritic and I got that from fiction.)
I dunno. I read The Last Ringbearer (pretty good, although I have mixed feelings about it in general), but it doesn't seem interesting to me either.