The Science and Engineering of Materials

"The copper age, the iron age, the silicon age . . . eras defined by the materials found in nature, but manipulated by the engineers of their day. The fundamental principles of structure, defects, kinetics, and processing are generally applicable to all materials, while over time our understanding has advanced and incorporated new ideas. As a result, the observable and macroscopic behavior of materials, spanning such varied characteristics as mechanical strength and toughness, electrical conductivity, refractive index, and corrosion resistance, is both understood more deeply and related more directly to underlying atomic level phenomena. Our tools for characterizing and manipulating materials have also grown vastly more sophisticated, allowing for deeper insights into materials structures and phenomena. At the edge of innovation we find the discovery, or even the creation of entirely new materials, often made possible by new processing techniques, by circumventing equilibrium to cause materials to exist in metastable states, and by developing the tools to assemble, form, and study materials at the nanoscale. It is now routine, for instance, to examine materials at the near-atomic level for both structure and composition, using techniques such as high resolution transmission electron microscopy, grazing incidence x-ray diffraction, and electron energy loss spectroscopy. At the same time, materials processing has advanced to the point where thin films just a few atomic layers thick can in many instances be grown or deposited, while three-dimensional structures with dimensions of only a few tens of nanometers or less can also be manufactured. The entire electronics industry, for instance, is based on these types of advances. Flat screen televisions, high-speed wireless data systems, portable computation and telecommunication devices, automobiles and other transportation systems . . . these and countless other technologies are all dependent on our contemporary understanding of materials"--