Nobel Week Latergram Science: When I was travelling earlier in the year, I had the fortune of flying on a Boeing 787 with Virgin Atlantic. The unusual thing was that I had to put up with a window seat for the first time in years, but it allowed me to discover this fun piece of gadget. So on 787 Dreamliners, they no longer have standard physical blinds for the windows. Instead, they have installed these fascinating smart glasses. There are five settings for each window and you can change the amount of shading from near-complete transparent to near-complete translucent within seconds. Out of curiosity I looked up the technology behind it. Apparently these glasses, patented by Research Frontiers, belong to a class of materials called Suspended Particle Devices (SPD). On standing, the particles are distributed across space randomly and move about by Brownian motion and block out light. When you apply a voltage, these particles line up and arrange themselves to allow light to pass through. Three questions came to mind immediately: 1) what are these particles (presumably molecules with large dipole moments); 2) how energy efficient are these given you have to apply voltages across all the windows to keep them transparent and; 3) how many reversible iterations can they perform before these glasses fail (for chemical reasons)?
P.S. They also have "Le Marteau sans maître" (Sony recording) on the classical playlist. Virgin Atlantic has very good taste in music.
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