We are probably heard about a chemist, a biologist and a physicist, but have we ever heard of a materials scientist? Probably not. One reason is that materials science covers a huge range of activity and touches on many different fields - including chemistry, biology and physics. Sometimes materials scientists are called ceramic or polymer engineers or metallurgists and we can find them working in the industries, labs and universities all over the world. But diverse as they are, materials scientists look at materials from a unified point of view: they look for connections between the underlying structure of material, its properties, how processing changes it, and what the material can do – its performance. In the past, people used and changed materials by trial and error. And they worked on a big, visible scale – for example, heating then rapidly cooling chunks of iron to make it harder. Modern materials scientists manipulate and change materials based on fundamental understandings on how the materials are put together, often on the invisibly – tiny scales of atoms.
estidotmy
28 september 2005
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