Aerogel as structural material (New York Times article case)

Used as Tom's exemplar of "boutique materials" — researchers chasing the lightest material in the world without having an application for it. Twenty-five years of research without payoff.

One of the biggest fallacies in the area of people overselling materials is that they say, "Oh, I just got the lightest material in the world." The lightest material in the world is an aerogel. Anyone ever heard of aerogel before? What's an aerogel?

Example of a student presentation that paraphrased press coverage of a "wonder material" without checking whether it had ever been deployed. Used as a cautionary tale about presentation scope.

I did give a couple of B's last year because people came in and gave me stories like that. One of them just paraphrased what they'd read in the New York Times about ultra-lightweight composites in Boeing aircraft. At the end of the story they sort of admitted they would never use these composites because they were too expensive and they had no structural integrity — they were so lightweight that they just collapsed. Things like aerogels. An aerogel has a density half that of water, and if you blow on it, it will collapse. It has about the structural integrity of a soap bubble. Put any stress on it and it collapses.