Are real nano wires like the ones in Larry Niven?

[cybernetichero]

Hi, this is my VERY FIRST post so if I've made a bundle of noob mistakes accept my pre-emptive mea culpa. I did read and like the rules.
I have seen some stories in Phys.org about nano wires and I immediately thought of the nano wires in Larry Niven Known Space milieu which can cut right through you under their own weight. Is there any truth in his depiction of these materials?

 

[Halc]

Any wire with the properties suggested would be essentially weightless and completely flexible. The inertial problem can be overcome with the little ball they put at the end of it, but the only way to make a theoretical infinitely thin wire straight is to put some tension on it. That can also be done with something that say has the hilt repelling the ball at the end, or some kind of hacksaw arrangement like the cheese cutters they use (a thin wire under high tension that requires almost no force).

Niven is great at positing impossible technologies. Reactionless drives and stasis fields are two, and he doesn't think them all through. A reactionless drive can deliver infinite energy, but nobody seems to use it for that. A stasis field can be used to build a bridge over the ocean with infinite durability and minimal cost, but nobody seems to think of this. The scrith of the ringworld would be far more durable if it was implemented as a Styrofoam ring put in a stasic field.

Is there a real material that has the strength to cross-section ratio needed for the nano wire? Carbon nano-tubes comes to mind and I don't know how thin those can be made.

 

[cybernetichero]

Any wire with the properties suggested would be essentially weightless and completely flexible. The inertial problem can be overcome with the little ball they put at the end of it, but the only way to make a theoretical infinitely thin wire straight is to put some tension on it. That can also be done with something that say has the hilt repelling the ball at the end, or some kind of hacksaw arrangement like the cheese cutters they use (a thin wire under high tension that requires almost no force).

Niven is great at positing impossible technologies. Reactionless drives and stasis fields are two, and he doesn't think them all through. A reactionless drive can deliver infinite energy, but nobody seems to use it for that. A stasis field can be used to build a bridge over the ocean with infinite durability and minimal cost, but nobody seems to think of this. The scrith of the ringworld would be far more durable if it was implemented as a Styrofoam ring put in a stasic field.

Is there a real material that has the strength to cross-section ratio needed for the nano wire? Carbon nano-tubes comes to mind and I don't know how thin those can be made.

I was thinking more of a scene in Ringworld (it's been a while so I may be apocryphal) where one of the sun mirrors has been dislodged and long streams of nano wire came drifting "down" onto one of the habitat sections like a barely seen fog. Louis Wu tries to stop local humans touching it but too late, they sever limbs etc. before they realize what has happened.

 

[Halc]

If it had, without tension, enough inertia to do that to the humans, it would, under its own weight, cut into the landscape and just keep going down. It wouldn't gather in a pile like that. Niven is giving his string the properties he wants selectively, only when it's convenient to the plot.