Letter from the President
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Materials as Information As each day passes it is becoming more apparent what it means to live in the information age. Our Computers go faster, our e-mail boxes fill up ever more rapidly, our notion of the " d e s k t o p " has changed from a wooden surface to a Vir tual space on a monitor. The explosive growth of the value of information is manifest in the stock market where, for example, the market valuation of Yahoo recently exceeded that of Boeing. Employment trends are shifting also: Whereas 26% of the U.S. workforce was in manufacturing in 1970, that percentage has declined to 15% today. If this trend continues, then by 2035, the workforce percentage in manufacturing will be 2.6%—the same percentage currently working on farms. In the midst of all this information flowing a r o u n d them at blinding speed and deafening volumes, materials researchers can be excused for having a nagging Sensation that somehow materials and materials research will be less central to human progress and welfare in the Coming Century than during the last. I believe that, to the contrary, materials and materials research will be even more important in the next Century. And here is a reason why: Materials and materials research are information.
"How do we assess the value of a material? In the headlong rush into the informa tion age, we might ponder the question, "How do we assess the value of a materi al?" One approach is to consider its value as a raw material resource, that is, to determine the world's available supply and demand, the costs of extraction and shipping, and so on. FoUowing this line of reasoning, one would quickly arrive at what is essentially the commodity price. Apart from hoarding or inciting speculative trading in commodities' future markets, there is very little that one can do to affect the value of a commodity material. Consumers hardly ever use commodity materials themselves anyway (how many kilograms of any pure element or Com pound do you have at home?), but use them as part of a more complex System. So another approach is to consider the end-use value of materials when they are added to a larger functional System (e.g.,
MRS BULLETIN/JANUARY 2000
an automobile, an airplane, or a Comput er). One can argue compellingly that almost all of the added value of a material integrated into a System is information— information gleaned from often extensive research and d e v e l o p m e n t about the material's initial purity and method of synthesis, about its structure and evolution with processing, about its Perfor mance and reliability during use, and about its synergistic or detrimental interactions with other materials that comprise the finished product. Indeed, it is infor mation content that distinguishes a high value-added material from a commodity. If researchers need subtle or complex— and little known—information in order to synthesize a material, it can have high added value. If no subtle or complex infor mation is required to make the material— or if these methods are widely known— the materia
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