NASA has invented the tricorder.

A couple centuries early and in a significantly smaller package!

My Motorola flip phone is smaller than the original Star Trek communicator.

Next, will see phasers invented. That would be cool!

The interesting trivia here to me is that, while it can identify unique signatures from each material, we don't have the physics/math to work out what the signature of a given material will be, or vice versa.

"This is an unknown material, Captain."

I'll bet that if you hooked it up to a neural network, it could learn after a while. It's just a pattern-recognition problem.

Rand:

Given that it's an unsolved problem for 75 years of human physicists, I doubt a neural net will solve it:

The actual spectrographic technique is known as Raman spectroscopy. It was invented by a man from India in 1928, he won the Nobel Prize in 1930, a pure quantum mechanical process. We don’t know how to compute the spectra so the only way we can really identify things is if we have shot it before

Although apparently (reading further) we get a pretty good estimate of what elements compose a new material...

Now all we need to do is sample the tricorder sound from the Star Trek tapes to play while we are using the thing.

Well, I would like to go out into deep space, and tricorder is problely may become a great tool when visiting other worlds. Personal I am waiting technology to do this. The private space org are going to show, if I can go, or not. This is a guy whis no high school, and with a ged.