Full Circle
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Full Circle A few years ago, I was walking near the old Union Station in Pittsburgh with a colleague only slightly younger than myself, when we happened upon some large-scale relics of the steel industry displayed for public viewing. “You don’t see too many of those in public parking lots,” I offered. “Um… what is it?” was the response. I suppose I was just a little surprised that a prominent materials scientist did not recognize a Bessemer converter— arguably the principal source of wealth during the U.S. industrial revolution—but this conversation took place back when steel was in decline, and many university Materials Science and Engineering depart ments had dropped it from the required curriculum. Times change. For the last year or two, about a third of the students graduating from my own department have taken jobs in the steel industry, where scarcely any had gone in the preceding decade or two. Currently, the steel companies are recruiting heavily, and trying hard to hire our best and brightest students. The shake-out and resurgence of the steel industry is a case-study in international market economics, but it is also an example of a widespread phenomenon in the sociological history of materials science: Interest in any particular topic is cyclic. And it is not a nice, smooth, and manageable sinewave type of function, either: it is more like an aperiodic square wave, with unexpected sharp rises and precipitous drops. In another example of this interestcycle, the nuclear industry and nuclear research in the United States are undergoing a striking renaissance, following a nearly total collapse in construction and research funding following the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, and then the much worse one at Chernobyl in 1986. Although the underlying needs for 600
materials, and for research on them, follow predictable trends, the drivers for changes in research funding are usually external. Energy needs continued to grow after the Three Mile Island accident, but public concerns over reactor safety had more influence than the growth in energy demand, and alternate solutions were sought. Now that some of those are showing signs of running out, and concern about global warming is on the rise (yes, even in the United States!) nuclear power is beginning to be attractive again.
“Interest in any particular topic is cyclic.” In an interest-cycle embedded within a cycle of interest, there has recently been renewed attention to a famous bet about the price of basic commodities, between Paul Ehrlich (professor of Population Studies at Stanford University) and Julian Simon (professor of Business Administration at the University of Maryland). In 1980, Ehrlich bet that the price of a selection of commodity metals would be higher in 10 years because of the ever-increasing demand. Simon took the bet, confident that technology would make the extraction of the metals cheaper, or would find alternatives for those that were really running out. Simon won. Not only did the overall price of the agreed basket of commodities dr
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