New materials

A new material is rarely a new element. It is almost always an arrangement: la matriz and el refuerzo, one layer on another, a structure smaller than the light that falls on it. Halfway down sits la deposición por vapor, and it is worth knowing that English made a split here that Spanish did not. El vapor is any substance in the gas phase, and it is also the white cloud over a kettle. English keeps « vapour » for the first and « steam » for the second, which is why an engine is a steam engine while a coating is grown by vapour deposition, and why the two words are almost never interchangeable. One is chemistry, the other is a picture of hot water — but Spanish says vapor for the locomotive and for the process in the vacuum chamber, and the sentence has to carry the difference.