WIT Press


Isotopic Diversity In Natural And Engineering Design

Price

Free (open access)

Volume

73

Pages

9

Published

2004

Size

223 kb

Paper DOI

10.2495/DN040411

Copyright

WIT Press

Author(s)

A.A. Berezin

Abstract

A. A. Berezin Department of Engineering Physics, McMaster University, Canada Abstract In designing its numerous structures (molecules, crystals, minerals, biological forms, etc) nature primarily uses the diversity of chemical elements. Almost everything we see around us results from the combination of just 90 or so chemical elements. However, most chemical elements are mixtures of several stable isotopes. This fact (isotopic diversity, or \“isotopicity”) has a variety of physical, chemical, biological and engineering applications, such as isotopic engineering design and isotopic information storage. We present isotopicity as a singular concept in its own right which serves as a unifying framework for the creativity exhibited by nature in its naturally created structures as well as in structures produced by technological imagination. Keywords: stable isotopes, isotopic effects, isotopic engineering, biological evolution, digital coding, set theory, quantum probabilities. 1 Introduction An idea t

Keywords