Materials science is an interdisciplinary field that straddles engineering, chemistry, physics, metallurgy, and mineralogy—among other disciplines.
This field involves the development and discovery of new substances, how we might replicate those substances, make use of them, and if possible, improve upon them.
As as species, we've been doing basic materials science research since the beginning of recorded history. We figured out how to reshape rocks to make them pointy for hunting, we discovered clay in the soil and worked out methods for refining and using that clay, shaping it into drinking vessels and other useful objects.
We eventually began sorting more desirable minerals from their naturally occurring clusters, and we learned how to heat, melt, and smelt copper and gold and iron. We learned to alloy and develop new metals from other, simpler metals.
We figured out how to make glass and concrete and cork and steel, porcelain and gasoline and all sorts of acids and vulcanized rubber.
The modern world is filled with countless plastics and metals and chemicals and substances. Each and every non-natural surface we touch is the consequence of ages of exploration and invention and the often less-appreciated, but typically more time-consuming and arguably impactful work required to make a new discovery or invention reproducible and practical—both in terms of making it into something useful, and in terms of ensuring we're capable of producing it on the necessary scale.
Whatever their developmental birthdate, wherever their origin, and however they might be produced, today, such materials have come shape our landscapes in fundamental ways.
Our shelter—the very concept of non-cave walls—is the consequence of artifice. Any decorations on those walls, the electrical cables that run through them, the paint we might apply to our walls, and the glass windows that allow us to peer through them: all are based on materials we've extracted and refined, or concocted and distributed.
Such materials can influence our perception in the sense that we make assumptions about people, places, things, and concepts based on our understanding of these components, and in the sense that we can consequently develop material-based biases.
If you grew up in a wealthy, Western country, there's a good chance that a village where the houses are primarily made out of mud, wood, and thatching will seem quite old-fashioned and perhaps even poor according to your sensibilities.
Most wealthy, Western countries have histories with such materials, but have long-since changed over to different, often far more resilient, lightweight, and industrially refined substances.
In some ways, this heuristic is accurate: villages with mud huts, in the modern world, are often poor in the economic sense, and less developed in the technological and industrial sense.
But in some cases, that assumption is far off-base: so-called Earthships—which are based on an architectural and materials philosophy that was initially developed in the 1970s, but which continues to serve as an inspiration for new structures, today—make use of many of the less-processed components and the more traditional building methods found in those mud hut-centric villages.
This doesn't mean that older is better, less-processed is better, or any other broad statement of that kind, because "better" is a very subjective term with a lot of context-specific definitions.
But it does cast a light on some of the biases we might have about such materials. That it seems strange to use mud, clay, and unprocessed wood to build new, modern structures—that these materials can seem anachronistic when applied to contemporary shapes and use-cases—speaks volumes about our expectations and perceptual framing of how such substances are meant to be used, and in some cases, by whom.
The evolution of materials science can also influence our perception of possibilities, and reflexive sense of environmental physics.
Before steel, metal was typically seen as either being too soft and frail to be used for anything other than decoration—like gold—or so heavy and unwieldy that it was primarily useful as a sort of shapable rock.
The development and continued innovation of steel, and other metals like aluminum, and more modern alloys with increasingly sophisticated, often use-case specific attributes, has slowly changed our expectations of metal objects.
If you were to tell me that a thin sheet of metal could behave as a superconductor, could become transparent, or could sustain the weight of a massive boulder, I wouldn't be surprised; I've seen metal do all kinds of things, so my expectations for this material has become fairly fluid.
The same is true, increasingly, of other materials, like glass.
The front surfaces of many smartphones are touch-sensitive, scratch-resistant, shatter-proof, and have a slew of other useful properties that continue to scale in scope and utility.
Go to the top of a tall, tourist-attraction tower, and there's a good chance you'll be able to stand on a sheet of glass that's more than capable of safely holding you and dozens of other people far above the city, without any real chance of shattering or otherwise dropping you the dozens of stories to the ground, below.
Today, we're able to transmit gobs of information through what amounts to strands of glass wrapped in plastic, buried underground, connecting geographically distant devices made of metal and silicon so that information can be shared and consumed via screens made out of organic electroluminescent diodes—a thin film of an organic compound that we can make do all sorts of sophisticated things by placing it between electrodes and applying an electrical current.
Show our pre-Stone Age ancestors a lump of clay and there's a good chance they'd see only soil.
Show a modern child that clay, and there's a good chance they'd see the same.
Show someone who uses clay as a core tool-making, road-carving, and home-building component, though, and they'd likely be able to tell you whether it's a good consistency, how it would need to be processed for various use-cases, and maybe even where you dug it up.
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