And all it takes is a silly amount of electricity.
Transparent aluminium is a substance that all trek fans will instantly recognise; with the strength of a metal but the transparency of a pane of glass, it's the material used to keep tonnes of water at bay in Star Trek IV.
Scientists at the FLASH facility in Hamburg, Germany have managed to create their own version of this wonderful metal - but this is nowhere near as useful.
They took a sheet of aluminium foil and spread it out in front of an X-ray laser, bombarding it with such high intensity X-rays that it makes the average death ray look pleasantly warm.
Ten million gigawatts of power per square centimetre, where a gigawatt is equivalent to a billion watts, means that the foil was assaulted by a phenomenal ten million billion watts per square centimetre!
Wikipedia reckons the power output of the entire planet is roughly 15 trillion watts, the average nuclear power plant will make between 500 million to 1300 million watts, and a diesel locomotive could make up to 5 million watts - making this a silly amount of train engines applied to a teensy piece of aluminium foil!
The huge amount of energy blasting against the aluminium rips electrons out of each atom, doing it so quickly that they've got no chance to replace them in time and giving the piece of metal transparency - the scientists could peek through it to see what was on the other side.
As with anything using this much energy there are problems, and the power consumption notwithstanding the ions inside the aluminium just don't like being ripped apart so violently:
This state doesn't last long, though. Within fractions of a nanosecond, the energy pumped into the electrons is delivered to the ions, and the ions fly apart violently. "As soon as you make it, the stuff blows up," says Justin Wark of the University of Oxford.
Yeah, it explodes - kind of like making nitroglycerin inside a martini shaker while hopped up on speed.
So sure we can't make the aluminium actually stay transparent for very long, but it won't take long for the principles to be applied to other alloys and it's more than possible we can find one that will do this easily later on.
For now it tells us a lot about the materials inside the cores of planets, especially those huge gassy balls Jupiter and Saturn, so head over to New Scientist to take a peek at this overly excitable metal.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009