Question: What is the strongest material in the world

Helena Quilter answered on 13 Mar 2016:

Hi Callum!

That’s quite a hard question to answer because there can be different answers depending on what you think of when you say strongest!

Some people think it means how tough the material is and some people think it means how much weight you can put on it before it breaks.

One of the hardest natural materials is diamond. Diamond is made up from carbon atoms stuck together. Diamonds are really hard to scratch and they’re used to drill though metal! They’re not very tough though – diamonds can be broken – if you hit them with a hammer they will smash into pieces.

Another strong natural material is spider silk – what spiders make their webs out of. A single thread of spider silk can be stronger than steel!

Like Gabriel said, graphene is a really strong material – definitely one of the strongest materials in the world. There are lots of people interested in graphene because it’s so strong. It’s also really useful for electronics – scientists think it would be useful for computer chips.

Graphene is made up of a single layer of carbon atoms. They’re arranged in hexagons – a bit like honeycomb – and that’s what makes it so strong.

One of the scientists who discovered graphene said “it would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene as thick as clingfilm” – that’s how strong it is!

If you had lots of sheets of graphene stuck together it becomes graphite – that’s what pencil lead is made from. That’s actually quite crumbly and not strong at all. Graphene is very strong but only a single atom thick – we wouldn’t be able to use it to build things like buildings out of.

Scientists are now working on even stronger materials than graphene!