Four decades of materials developments transform society
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Four decades of materials developments transform society
the Society’s annual meetings from the outset until today. The fact that the materials issues (far less the social and political issues) have still not been solved is an indication of the difficulty of the challenge. Yet this was one of the first areas in which it was clear that materials science and engineering would be central to energy technologies. These topics were chosen not just because of their intrinsic importance and, on the whole, their novelty, but because of their potential social impact. They all illustrate how the science is driven by societal demands and needs, and also how complex a matter it is to effect a transition from promising basic science to useful applications. In all cases, one can see a constant interplay between theory and empiricism, and examples of how advances in techniques and instrumentation can be at least as significant as advances in conceptual understanding. But what perhaps emerges most strikingly from these case histories is the degree to which advances depend on dialogue between different research communities. As polymer chemist Andrew Holmes of the University of Melbourne in Australia said, “[T]he big breakthroughs are coming from the interface of disciplines.” Interdisciplinarity has always been a strength of materials science—which in this sense at least was thus a harbinger of things to come.
By Philip Ball Feature Editor Gordon Pike
W
hen the Materials Research Society (MRS) was formed 40 years ago, it entered a very different social and technological landscape from that of today, and inevitably many of its priorities were different then. This article examines some selected areas of materials science that, while representing the breadth and scope of the discipline today, were on the whole either nascent or unguessed of four decades previously. Probably the most obvious, and arguably the most transformative, new field of science and technology to have emerged in the intervening time is information and communication technology: computer and cell-phone networks, wireless handheld electronics, new forms of electronic display, and the merging of electronic and photonic technologies. This is why three of the six topics considered here involve electronic materials. Meanwhile, advances in computation have made it possible to
model materials with ever greater detail, precision, and verisimilitude than before, as acknowledged here by an examination of the challenges of computational materials science that spans many scales in size and time. Materials science has long since burst the bounds of traditional engineering and moved into just about all areas of fundamental and applied science. One that will probably have the most profound impact on daily life is biomaterials: the development of new fabrics for medicine and bioengineering. Tissue engineering—the creation of new living materials, and the blending of the natural and synthetic—is perhaps the most remarkable example of this fusion. The sixth topic here, materials
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