Materials: Fact or Fiction - Tauranga (19 October)

Event details

Tricorder – a fictional device from the world of Star Trek - is a multifunction hand-held device used for sensor (environment) scanning, data analysis, and recording data.

Mithril is a precious, silvery metal featured in Lord of the Rings that is very lightweight but immensely strong and used to produce extremely lightweight, hard and durable armour. It could be beaten and polished without being weakened or tarnished.

From what we know of the periodic table and the world around us, could these exist in real life?

Join us for ‘Materials Fact or Fiction’, where MacDiarmid researchers delve into the periodic table to give us their scientific take on whether these could be reality in a not too far off future. 

Dr Michel Nieuwoudt, a MacDiarmid Institute Associate Investigator and a Research Scientist at the University of Auckland, will give us her take on the Tricorder from Star Trek.

She will be joined by Dr Chris Bumby, another Associate Investigator in the MacDiarmid Institute and also a Principal Scientist at the Robinson Research Institute of Victoria University of Wellington, who will discuss Mithril from Lord of the Rings.

The event will be chaired by Otago Museum science communicator Dr Claire Concannon as MC. There’ll be two talks, a three-minute animated video on the ‘science of lightsabers’, and time for Q&A.

Due to recent uncertainty around COVID alert levels, the MacDiarmid Institute researchers and Claire will be contributing digitally to this event, but the public is invited to attend the event in person as normal and will still have the opportunity to ask questions of our speakers.