Complexity guru Stephen Wolfram says that the future of bridge design is in structures generated through the reiteration of a few simple rules.
It's a pretty cool idea, though Wolfram might have been a little too simplistic in his own starting rules. "Even biology -- with its iterative process of natural selection -- probably can't find structures as good -- and irregular -- as the ones I expect are out there," he wrote.
But it's never good to underestimate nature, and as the burgeoning field of biomimetics has shown, the natural world can teach us a lot about structural and material science. And when I read the following American Scientist abstract, my thoughts went straight to Wolfram and his bridges:
The queen conch is a marine snail that grazes seagrass beds in shallow Caribbean waters. It does so openly, and with little fear of natural predators: Unmolested by human fishers, an adult conch may live 20 years. This prodigious lifespan for an invertebrate is possible because of the conch's amazing shell, a defensive adaptation that represents the pinnacle of molluskan evolution. In conch shell, slender crystallites of calcium carbonate are bound by a proteinaceous glue into planks, sheets, and layers, and at each level of organization, adjacent elements are oriented at right angles. This architecture dissipates the force that might otherwise fracture the shell through a system of noncatastrophic microcracks. Breaking into a conch shell requires a crack to travel a tortuous path of false starts and switchbacks as it wends from sheet to sheet and layer to layer. In addition to such estimable toughness, the shell microstructure self-assembles and is self-healing, providing a lofty target that human engineers are beginning to match.
So how about it, bridgebuilders of the future: why not try to reverse-engineer the simple rules by which conch shells are generated?
Might be a few good recipes in there....
Secrets in the Shell [American Scientist]
Related Wired biomimetics coverage: lots!
Image: Ernst Haeckel*
