Quote:
Originally Posted by cptbutton
I think they were in A Gift From Earth (1968), if not earlier.
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Yes to both. The
SF Encyclopedia's earliest reference is a 1963 Randall Garrett story, "Thin Wire", unless you count the 1951 film "The Man in the White Suit" (in which I don't think it was a weapon, just a monofilament super-nylon wonder material).
Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
Glass knife edges aren't much narrower than steel ones, maybe a factor of 2 or 3.
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Numbers I turned up yesterday put steel at 50 nm, with obsidian at around 3. Maybe they were underestimating the steel, though, or comparing something like a typical commercial razor to best possible scalpel.
It's interesting that those edges are already only around ten atoms thick, so "one atom wide" isn't nearly as much of an improvement as it sounds like.