Isotopic diversity in natural and engineering design

摘要

In designing its numerous structures (molecules, crystals, minerals, biological forms, etc) nature primarily uses the diversity of chemical elements. Almost everything we see around us results from the combination of just 90 or so chemical elements. However, most chemical elements are mixtures of several stable isotopes. This fact (isotopic diversity, or "isotopicity") has a variety of physical, chemical, biological and engineering applications, such as isotopic engineering design and isotopic information storage. We present isotopicity as a singular concept in its own right which serves as a unifying framework for the creativity exhibited by nature in its naturally created structures as well as in structures produced by technological imagination.