Fiction, Faction, Function
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2007 Fall Meeting
F07 Request for Symposium Proposals
November 26 - 30 Exhibit: November 27 - 29 Boston, MA
The Chairs for the 2007 Fall Meeting are accepting symposium proposals through April 3, 2006. Proposals should include a description of the suggested topic, the names and affiliations of probable symposium organizers, and comments about the topic’s importance to the materials science community as well as its history, if any, at previous MRS events.
Please send proposals via e-mail to:
Duane Dimos ([email protected]), Mary Galvin ([email protected]), David Mooney ([email protected]), and Konrad Samwer ([email protected]).
POSTERMINARIES
Fiction, Faction, Function or, What’s In a Name? Juliet assured Romeo, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.” Maybe; or as Evelyn Waugh would have said: “Up to a point, Lord Copper.” The names we use for materials definitely modify our attitude to them. More importantly, they probably modify the public’s attitude, too. Let’s stay with fiction for a moment. Think of the internationally best known fictional material—kryptonite. Why are we familiar with the material from Superman? Because of repetition to us at a formative age. But what a crazy name—it’s supposed to be a metallic element, but its name is based on krypton (an inert gas, not a solid), with an ending appropriate to a compound, not an element. What was wrong with saturnium, or argabuthonium? Since 1949, generations of young people have been confused about inert gases and the endings for metallic elements! Other fictional inventions have had happier results. In Peter Pan, pixie dust allows us to fly if we are thinking happy thoughts; IBM updated the concept when describing its antiferromagnetically coupled media technology, which can increase the data capacity of hard drives by using “magnetic pixie dust.” Dust itself is a material in Philip Pullman’s “Dark Materials” trilogy—or is it? Many believe that rather than a physical material, dust is an allusion to God. This is more interesting than the idea of an all-pervasive fine-grained material that settles on any flat surface overnight, but it does not help our confused youth come to grips with the material universe. From fictional to factional materials. How else would we describe the subset of metallurgists who support aluminum
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over steel, or the coterie of semiconductor mystics who espouse gallium arsenide in the face of silicon? And, more seriously still, the nuclear faction in the energy industry, who have a whole set of materials and problems to themselves. The issue here for materials researchers is not the political decision making, nor even the materials selection and disposal problems, but the potential disappearance of this faction because of non-replacement by young incomers. This threatens to leave society with no expertise to draw upon when making future decisions in a vital area, and risks new designs requiring that elu-
The functional name which transcends all others is “smart mat
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