Signing off
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“B
right lights” are a universal metaphor for the generic big city, but there are a few cities that are iconically associated with specific and highly recognizable bright lights. Times Square is the world-known symbol for New York City, as are the lights in Piccadilly Circus for London, and The Strip for Las Vegas. For most of the second half of the 20th century the light for these displays was generated by neon glowing in intricately formed glass tubes, and their particular hues, jerky animation, and flickering unreliability symbolized all that was simultaneously glamorous and tawdry about night life in the city. Boston’s bright lights are different. In New York or London or Las Vegas, the best view of the lights is from the streets below, mingling with the crowds and craning your neck to look upward (or, even better, downward to see them reflected in rainy pavement). The iconic bright light in Boston, however, is the CITGO sign located near Kenmore Square, and it is set far too high up to be well seen from immediately below. The best views are from farther away, even from an airplane on approach to Logan Airport if you are lucky enough to fly in after dark and have a window seat on the proper side. It is a modern beacon for the city that was originally built around Beacon Hill. And while the bright lights in other cities advertise life’s frivolous pleasures—alcohol, soda, high-end watches, and electronics— Boston’s illuminated focus is on motor fuel. This is a city that retains the serious attitudes of its puritan roots, even to this day. The CITGO Petroleum Corporation calls its logo the trimark, but any MRS member taking a break from the Fall Meeting and looking over toward the Fenway will see that a tetrahedron is clearly represented on the 60-foot wide sign. The tetrahedron,
after all, is an iconic shape for almost every branch of materials science. Some of us deal with oxygen tetrahedra, others with face-centered cubic metals and their stacking-fault tetrahedra (nicely described using the notation of Thompson’s tetrahedron). Some ply their trade with Berkovich indenters. We are all familiar with tetrahedral coordination of the diamond cubic lattice, and carbon and silicon atoms in general, and we describe almost all crystal structures in terms of tetrahedra of some sort. We even describe our discipline in terms of an imaginary tetrahedral knowledge-space with vertices representing structure, processing, properties, and performance. The tetrahedron is probably more prevalent in our work than any other single solid shape is in any other branch of science. I relate especially to the CITGO sign because it is doublesided, and a pair of back-to-back Thompson tetrahedra was the representation of a twin boundary that I used in one of my earliest research papers. One person’s icon is easily enough adopted by another and, trademark issues notwithstanding, the CITGO sign might be taken by MRS members to represent materials science, at least for one week each year, during the Fall Meeting. Maybe if it were labeled like
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