Age of Ultron Arc reactor element

[mocomic]

Thought this belonged here

Tony never named the element he made in IM2 .
You think it's Vibranium?

Howard had Caps shield, but maybe he couldn't recreate another's work?

Anybody think this will all become important ?

I mean how do you know the structure and characteristic of an element you don't have, thus the lost shield.

 

[cph9fa]

I don't think Tony's element is meant to be Vibranium, but I do think we'll see Vibranium again. Doesn't Vibranium come from meteors? Howard said that Cap's shield was all of it there was in the world, but I think that more will have since been discovered in Wakanda. Whether we'll get to see that in AoU, I don't know (apparently, Marvel has been looking at a shooting location in South Africa, which many assume will be Wakanda). I suppose it could also turn up in Agents of SHIELD.

I mean how do you know the structure and characteristic of an element you don't have

Science! And Math! It's possible to make all kinds of theoretical predictions about how a certain particles and materials should act, even without having any. It's how we were able to design the Large Hadron Collider to look for Higgs Bosons, without ever having seen one before.

Though, to be fair, I try not to think about the Periodic Table too much while watching Marvel films...

 

[The Question]

I mean how do you know the structure and characteristic of an element you don't have, thus the lost shield.

Scientists do it all the time. They can use elements that we already know exist to predict what theoretical elements might be like. Heck, on the Periodic Table, at least when I was in middle school, there is a space for elements that haven't actually been observed to exist yet but we've figured out what they'd probably be like through math.

 

[LTM438]

In the final issue of the Avengers tie-in comic "Fury's Big Week", Nick Fury tells Dr. Selvig that Tony was trying to officially name his element "Badassium" but he was getting trouble from the review boards on that one.

 

[jaqua99]

^ that's actually wicked funny.