I need help creating this fictional material

[u/Ender_Gamer7433]

So, I'm writing a novel and trying to make it as realistic as possible

But in one scene of it there is a character that jumps from 20+ stores building into a truck full of specific material and survives

So, obviously, no known material on earth can save you from that fall, not even none-neutonic materials, specially that the material is supposedly an undiscovered material/element that popped out of the ground as a result of WW3

So here is the three things I need this element to be able to do

1- able to withstand impact anywhere between a car crash and a speeding bullet

2- withstand extreme heat, I don't know how much yet but probably 1000 Celsius MAX

3- sure, the one thing I made this post for, someone can fall into a pool of it from 20+ stores high and not die, or at least some minor broken bones (this specific section as far as I know, excludes none-neutonic materials)

4- have some kind of reaction to electricity, specifically human brain wave

5- can transition between liquid and solid, for example if I wear a mask out of it permanently, with the right adjustments, the eye area of the mask can turn liquid and spread around the other parts of the mask which is still solid so I can do eye surgery for example

Can, all these properties, be physically and chemicaly in the same material?

In other words, would a physicist or a chemist crash out on me?

[u/HeDoesNotRow]

You’d have to do the math but I’m not confident even a perfectly ideal material could save you from 20 stories into a truck. The perfect material would be something that decelerates you completely uniformly from your speed at impact to 0 over the depth of the truck

I suspect this minimum average acceleration would still at minimum break your legs. You likely need to have more room to decelerate for this to be realistic

EDIT: I got bored and did the math. Assuming 20 stories = 240 feet and the truck is 10 feet deep you experience about 24 g’s for 0.16 seconds, which from what I can tell is survivable, but you’d almost certainly need to go to the hospital

[u/StillShoddy628 → u/HeDoesNotRow]

My highly scientific AI queries indicate that after 240 feet of falling the person will be traveling at about 85 mph, and you need a minimum stopping distance of 5-8 feet at that speed to survive the impact, with 5 feet being the historic limit of humans surviving a measured impact and 8 feet being “highly survivable”

[u/HeDoesNotRow → u/StillShoddy628]

85 mph (125 ft/s) is what I got so me and AI did the math the same. The “what happens to your body” part is less of a perfect science though

[u/nixiebunny]

Watch the original Batman movie, in which he falls from the Bat-copter onto a Foam Rubber Block Sidewalk Sale.

[u/Ender_Gamer7433 → u/nixiebunny]

But that's batman

The same batman who literally fell from the moon

He is a lot of things, but realistic isn't one of them

[u/nixiebunny → u/Ender_Gamer7433]

The point is that it needs to be bigger than the bed of a truck to absorb the fall from that height, so you either need a bigger device or some willing suspension of disbelief.

[u/xienwolf]

Be careful about trying to make your world realistic.

It is okay to have something which you say "nobody knows what it can do, but here are a few things which have worked so far!"

Specifically stating that research has been done on the material and it defies our understanding can get you out of a LOT of issues.

For example:

If this material can "withstand" impacts you talk about... how much of the material is needed? How heavy would that be? How common is the material? Why has no vehicle manufacturer cornered the market on this material? Why aren't smartphone cases being made out of it?

If this material can withstand those temperatures AND impacts, how far along is the design of a space shuttle using this material? Do they intend to have re-entry just be freefall? Is the inside of the shuttle also made of this material to protect the astronauts?

Anyhow.... as soon as you make things TOO realistic, there are TONS of reasons why your world starts to feel like the entire population is not realistic because various use cases are not being explored/exploited.

Leaving mystery material as a mystery allows you to say "We don't know exactly why, but this thing works and nothing else that you would think is related seems to."

[u/shelving_unit]

It doesn’t super matter. What is the focus of your writing? Adding all these details into your story means your story is or should be about communicating scientific details of imaginary objects. Is it prospective sci fi about such things?

[u/Connect-Answer4346]

The exotic matter slows time for things inside it, so you have 10x more time to slow down inside it.