Explain Yourself
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POSTERMINARIES
Explain Yourself Statistically speaking, air travel is very safe with respect to major hazards, but there is still a very high risk of being assigned a seat next to a garrulous, usually aged person. Why is seating preference restricted to “aisle” or “window?” Why can’t there be a “no conversation” section? There are few effective defenses against itinerant conversationalists, but only the most insistent of the breed will interrupt your reading, so it is a good idea to have a very thick novel to read, though you risk being asked for a review or even a book-club-style discussion if the fellow traveler happens to have read the book, so it is best to have obscure tastes in literature. Safer yet, just dig into a sheaf of manuscripts or proposals that you have to review. I have also begun to use a nice pair of noisecanceling headphones for in-flight entertainment or music stored on my laptop. As they are a usefully visible discouragement to the chatty traveler, I often keep them on even when I am not listening to anything. Eventually, however, you will be drawn into conversation. The conventions of polite airplane conversation allow your fellow traveler to ask where you are going (same place as YOU, of course!) and why. Most of our travel is work-related, so this inevitably leads to the question of what you do. I know that some of you pretend to be Ford dealers, management consultants, or tax inspectors in order to avoid explaining what a materials scientist is, so let’s try to find a better way to explain ourselves. We often describe our subject in terms of structure, properties, and processing, possibly throwing in “performance” to create a tetrahedral model that is instantly appealing to those of us who deal with atomic models in our daily labor. Of course, the rest of the world has not a clue what this means, and they are not even particularly attracted to ball-and-stick models of anything at all, let alone atomic metaphors for intellectual activities. We have to recognize that the description of which we are all so fond is only a good “internal” description for explaining our field to those who are already in it. What we need is an “external” description that allows a lay person to 88
believe that she/he understands it. It is always a good idea to start with something that your interlocutors understand, or at least think they do, and following Einstein’s dictum, the explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Let’s start with the technical details, for our own benefit. The figure shows a sort of Venn diagram of the domains of physics, chemistry, biology, and materials that is at least reasonably accurate. There is some overlap of physics and chemistry, representing chemical physics, or physical chemistry, depending on which side you come from. Similar overlaps exist between biology and the other two “basic sciences,” and there is even a region where all three overlap. A large part of physics falls within the domain of materials, as does a large part of chemistry and a small (but def
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