Material science is an incredibly complicated field full of details and nuances, and fiction just catastrophically simplifies it to always “strongest” and “stronger than everything else”, thus there is no real way to answer your question while maintaining that simplistic premise.
Real world materials are inevitably strong in some ways and weak in others. There is no single measurement of strength and there is no single property that fictional materials like Vibranium or Adamantium have that directly translates to the way real materials work.
We do have materials that are extremely hard like diamond, but they are typically also very brittle and diamonds are also surprisingly sensitive to temperature, despite their hardness, friction still makes heat, even on the microscopic scale, and heat makes them burn away, they’re not an infinite drill bit and even with perfect cooling and lubrication, which is realistically impossible, the tips and sharp points will eventually become smooth as they wear down. We have materials like concrete that can survive extreme compression loads, and fail miserably under tension, or shear, and vice versa. We have materials that can survive extreme temperatures and extreme changes and extreme chemicals without significant damage, but then they’ll go ahead and do something silly like degrade under exposure to oxygen in the atmosphere or wear down quickly under friction. We do have materials that can “heal” themselves when stressed or damaged, but maybe not fast enough to withstand the kind of loads and forces and conditions you need it to endure. Usually the materials you want to use for something are going to be constrained by weight, or size. Otherwise you could just use a 30 foot cube of solid lead for most purposes, weapon, armor, radiation shielding, electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, structural support, paperweight, whatever you need really, it’d be very multipurpose, probably don’t lick it though.
We do have plenty of materials that strike a good balance of properties, but they are probably never going to be the absolute hardest or most resilient in any category, they’re probably good for some particular purpose, and that’s what we use them for, but they always come with trade-offs and sacrifices to the point that it’s often hard to even agree on the “best, strongest” material for that particular purpose, nevermind a “best, strongest” material in general for any possible purpose. Reality is complicated and is full of complicated and dynamic challenges for materials to withstand. There’s no one-size-fits-all “strongest” material, and from what we know of materials science it’s not really clear there ever could be.
This. And to expand on this, if there were a material that was strong against all of the mentioned weaknesses, how would you form it into anything useful?
Typically via forging through heating and quenching, for metals. For crystals, probably through growing it in the desired shape.
Equivalent in terms of what? There is no material that can absorb immense force and dissipate it as vibrations. Kevlar and ceramics as used in body armor can take a bullet and decrease the pressure by spreading it over an area (and in the case of ceramics, using some of that force to shatter). But nothing is going to stop Thor’s hammer like Captain America’s shield does.
CrCoNi (an alloy of Chromoum-Cobalt-Nickel) is apparently the toughest alloy known surpassing even graphite; and since the only thing about adamantiun and vibranium that is really important is that they are the strongest metals in the fiction I would say that CrCoNi is the closest real world equivalent.
Cobalt-Chromium, or Cobalt-Chromium-Molybdenum are even used as artificial joints, heart valves, and dental implants because it’s so durable and corrosion resistant. They dropped Nickel from the alloy because it leached ions that aren’t good for humans.
Really close to the way adamantium is used in the comics.
There are a wide variety of exotic materials with exceptional strength and/or toughness. I think Graphene would have similar characteristics, if it could be formed into the weapons we see on screen.
Graphene, super conductors, and phase transition metals are going to be the future of cool stuff
actual intelligence?
No those are fantasy fictions.
I guess it would be what we make shields and artificial limbs out of. So Polycarbonate mostly I guess.






