An Ode to Materials Science and Engineering

by Katie O'Flaherty

The Secret Story of Stuff: Materials of the Modern Age

(BBC)

This is the latest of my forays into the world of materials science and engineering. Starting with my interest in a career improving chemicals and creating new ones, I began my search for a degree which would help me fulfil my want to maintain contact with the breadth of the sciences, while also being able to be up close and personal with the most fundamental building blocks of substances. A number of google searches later, and I stumbled across a new field; materials science. A few taps on the keyboard later, and I was immersed in video upon video of the most fantastic, unimaginable materials, and plethora of passionately-written articles on the wonders of some new product of a lab. Thus my new way of procrastinating was born.

So back to the first, still unexplained, sentence. On the surface, it seems to be a run of the mill documentary, shown by the BBC last week, and left to live out its life on iPlayer without a second thought. To me, however, it helped to show a world under the surface of our day to day life; a world of tiny yet monumental revolutions in the way the simplest tasks are performed. If you have any interest in fashion, technology, security, medicine, the environment, fire prevention, or stopping a bullet, then this documentary is well worth the watch. Designer and engineer Zoe Laughlin presents cutting edge science in an easily understandable manner, her obvious excitement at the wonders of her field never far, and all too infectious.

To pick out one of myriad fields shown which is being fundamentally changed by the research done into materials, ‘five dimensional’ glass is being used to store more data than imaginable on a tiny disc. Using a laser, nanoscale dots are inscribed in the glass, with each dot able to have up to 256 variations of shape and variation, allowing them to contain up to 8 bits of data each. So far, scientists have been able inscribe 200 layers of dots on top of each other on a single disk half a centimeter thick. Thus, each disk is able to contain up to 5 trillion dots. A normal CD can hold up to 128GBs of data. A CD-sized glass disk can hold up to 360TB. That’s nearly 3000 times the data storage, for the same size, with both simply using a laser to leave marks for another laser to read. Not only this, but the glass discs are predicted to be able to survive the lifetime of the universe without degrading, making them impenetrable fortresses of data storage.

This may seem to be one of those discoveries which is important to those in the business of data storage, but to not many others outside this rather select group. It is, however, the business of any laptop, tablet, or smartphone user. Imagine being able to take as many pictures as you want for the lifetime of your phone, with no regard to the space they will take up. Being able to download as many apps as you like without having to worry about your phone slowing down. Never worrying about your memory card being wiped or broken again. Though this technology is still in development, with the each disk only being able to be written on once at present, the race to use materials to improve the inner workings of the technology you take for granted every day is very real, and on the cutting edge of modern science.

Authors like Mark Miodownik help to show the world through the eyes of a materials scientist. Writing about the most apparently mundane topics, his books explore beneath the surface of materials such as paper, concrete, and chocolate, giving a glimpse of their beautiful chemical design. His clear adoration of his field leads to numerous witty anecdotes and analogies, bringing the humble shaving razor to the midst of a spy thriller, and weaving a 19th century tale about plastic as if the most wondrous material in the world.

The prevailing theme as I delve deeper into the novel world of materials is one of passion and love of the ordinary, of appreciating and celebrating the materials working in the background to facilitate and improve our day to day lives. One of seeing a problem and creating a solution, of being able to create the seemingly impossible. One of working striving towards the future, on the cutting edge of tomorrow’s science.