Did the paper plane on the left really fold itself into that shape?
Does that make the paper – or whatever material it is – “intelligent?
Is this the first inanimate object that can manipulate itself?
Or, for those old enough to remember them, is this like the SASE?
Remember the SASE? In case you don’t – it was a “Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope”.
I never did get them to work properly. The darned things never did address or stamp themselves.
They failed to function – at all.
Every single time I always ended up addressing them and putting on the stamp myself!
So has the problem finally been solved?
There’s a clue in the sentence below – along with more propaganda.
Call it one small step for material science, one giant leap for origami. Researchers have created the first heat-reactive polymer material that can not only remember its current shape but also memorize new ones.
The clue – it’s heat reactive.
The propaganda – that it “memorizes” new shapes.
PLEASE!!!
What is the need by some people to give “intelligence” to objects that don’t have any?
What is the need to make inanimate objects somehow seem to have characteristics in common with living objects?
Are we so desperate to be totally without hope that we have sunk to making ourselves no better than a lifeless object?
If you’re interested in the details of how it works – they’re in an article at sciencemag.org. It’s really quite interesting.
There is a story here.
But it’s not about “self-folding” inanimate objects.
It’s about people – using their God given brains and God given intelligence to figure out how to do something amazing with an inanimate object. By using heat, they can predictably and reliably apply the heat in the proper fashion to make that object change from one shape to another. This could indeed be useful and helpful.
That’s what we should be celebrating.
We should be praising the God who gives us the curiosity and the ability to do these things!