Quiz show question re alloys

Sorry misread the question

Edited By Ian Parkin on 11/03/2023 19:24:36

Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon, but carbon is not a metal.

Edit:- posted too soon!

Edited By Clive Brown 1 on 11/03/2023 19:26:43

Pedant Alert!

Strictly speaking Iron isn't a metal either, it's a Transition Metal. And Uranium isn't a metal at all. That's how Physical Chemists see it, but I believe Astronomers consider all elements to be metals apart from Hydrogen.

The comedian David Mitchell does an amusing rant on common words that make perfect sense but are scientifically inaccurate. Such as, there is no such animal as a fish, peanuts aren't nuts, strawberries aren't berries, and none of the fruits we eat are fruit.

Older I get, the more I realise that everything I thought I knew is wrong!

Dave

Good day for pedants today!

According to the interweb, transition metals are a subset of metals same as actinide metals (uranium et al )

Edited By duncan webster on 11/03/2023 23:13:37

And the actual “Quiz show question” is?

Edited By V8Eng on 12/03/2023 06:06:48

It was on Bridge of Lies. You had to decide which one of a number of statements was correct, the others being incorrect. This statement that prompted this thread was "all alloys contain metal".

Martin C

I misread/heard the question as all alloys contain 2 metals or more….

on rewatching it was one metal hence me deleting

I think saying Iron 'is not really a metal' doesn't really help the world. If Iron isn't a metal, then most people in the world would be confused. Confusion is bad for the world.

Personally, I present Iron as the perfect metal - right on the centre line of the periodic table.

What makes a metal? I should look it up but I suspect it is the ability for metallic bonding in all directions / homogenous structure (this qualifier added to exclude the likes of carbon).

Isn't a transition metal still a metal?

For most ordinary purposes I agree; it doesn't matter if we loosely call shiny stuff like Brass, Steel, and Aluminium 'metal'. It's shorthand for a group of materials that are clearly not Wood, Plastic, Stone, Cloth, or Gas. But metalworkers are often much more precise about what we mean by 'metal', for example, we demand 'steel' rather than 'brass', and go further, naming 'mild-steel', 'tool-steel', and 'HSS' etc. And even then a broad category like 'mild-steel' may not be precise enough, because we want a free-cutting alloy like EN1A-Pb.

Chemists, Physicists and Material Scientists have to be more precise than practical men. Designing a new alloy, perhaps a semi-conductor or a room temperature super-conductor, requires a deep understanding of why elements are different - see Chris Mate's periodic table above.

I don't know exactly what a metal is. My hazy understanding is the definition relates to an element's ability to lose electrons, a property that's not important to metal-bashers. Electrons are important in Chemical Engineering, Electronics, Materials Science and other technologies though. The need to be pedantically precise about metals is more relevant to lasers than lathes.

And maybe quiz programmes...

Dave

I remember 45 years ago defining a metal was one of the questions I was asked in my interview with The Welding Institute. They pitched it as 'We have sent you as the expert witness to a court and teh opposition lawyer asks you ....". Well they would have been pretty poor as a source of experts if the bets they could come up with is to send an undergraduate on such a job. Anyway I ended up better off giving up metallurgy for electronics.