The Undergraduate Physics and Materials Science Connection
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Introduction Materials science is fundamentally an interdisciplinary field. For purposes of discussing undergraduate préparation for work in materials science, I think it useful to take chemistry, physics, and materials science and engineering as three more-or-less separate disciplines which combine to form the overall field of materials science. The primary reason for this particular taxonomy is pragmatic rather than philosophical. Undergraduate students choose major fields of study on the basis of disciplinary boundaries. Thus, in thinking about undergraduate préparation for work in the overall field, analysis of the présent situation and/or recommendations for change must revolve around that reality. The récent report entitled Materials
Science and Engineering for the 1990s1 (the
MS&E Study), sets forth the four éléments of materials science and engineering as "structure and composition, properties, performance, and synthesis and processing." An examination of thèse spécifie éléments permits us to make useful distinctions among the three disciplines that combine to form the field of materials science. For example, while input from the point of view of physics certainly can contribute rather directly to expansion of our knowledge in the first three areas, its possible contribution to the last is, at best, indirect. To somewhat belabor the point, the research field of condensed matter physics is certainly contained within the field of materials but arguably not part of the discipline of materials science and engineering. The MS&E Study includes a chapter entitled "Manpower and Education in MRS BULLETIN/AUGUST1990
Materials Science and Engineering." Within that chapter is a section called "Undergraduate Education in Materials Science and Engineering." As I read those materials, I conclude that my comments on the rôle of undergraduate work in physics in the éducation of materials scientists should be viewed as adjoining rather than overlapping with the discussion in the MS&E Study report. Undergraduate study in physics plays several différent rôles in its relationship to the field of materials. The first rôle appears via the two- or three-term introductory course in physics which is taken by undergraduate students in chemistry and in materials science and engineering, as well as by students concentrating in physics itself. Two other rôles develop in the junior and senior years: 1. Of those undergraduate physics concentrators who go on to graduate school and a research career in physics, nearly half will end up working in the field of materials. It is of obvious interest to those of us concerned with the health of the materials field that the physics concentrators acquire some awareness of the content and challenges of the materials field during their undergraduate years. 2. Finally, concentrators from ail three disciplines may meet again in certain upper level courses taught by physicists which cater to the several groups. (The workshop is summarized in the article by R.J. Reynik in this issue of the MRS BULLETIN
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