Abstract
For millennia, materials have paced the evolution of technology. Their central importance in the advance of human civilization has been acknowledged in the naming of Ages, from Stone, Bronze and Iron to Silicon. While to the general public the structure of materials remains largely shrouded in medieval alchemical mystery, the specialists knowledge has seen an explosive growth over the past half century in the ability to observe, predict and manipulate multiscale material microstructures over a hierarchy of length scales. As an Age of Discovery draws to a close, a new confluence of natural philosophies has brought an Age of Design in which a rekindling of human creativity offers both new materials and ways of creating them beyond the dreams of the alchemist.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 175-190 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Calphad: Computer Coupling of Phase Diagrams and Thermochemistry |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2001 |
Funding
A useful comparison at this point is the highly productive relation between the life sciences and medicine. Here, a genuine desire to meet societal needs has produced a healthy mix of reductionist and systems viewpoints providing a continuous spectrum of activities to integrate scientific understanding into practical use. It is difficult to achieve such a relationship between the physical sciences and engineering in an academic culture that values science over engineering. Rather than science serving engineering, engineering serves as an (often superficial) excuse for science. Despite the external forces deflecting it, the central motivation of the materials science discipline remains the creation of improved materials rather than knowledge for its own sake. The philosophy of dynamic multilevel structure that flows from this motivation more closely resembles the life sciences than any other field. In the U.S., a healthy environment for academic engineering in general, and materials science in particular, must likely await the formation of a National Engineering Foundation managed from the systems perspective and most probably modeled after the National Institutes of Health.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Chemistry
- General Chemical Engineering
- Computer Science Applications