Material Science: The dankest form of engineering (old)

I wrote an article a bit ago, called Electrical Engineering: The Pinnacle of Man, arguing that Electrical Engineering is one of mankind’s greatest achievement. This was based on the fact that through its application we can now control electrons, the substance that surrounds and controls most things, at will. Which is pretty crazy if you think about it.

However, I don’t want anyone to interpret that as if I hold electrical engineers higher than any other discipline, because I don’t. I am also not arguing that all engineering disciplines are created equal, even though on most levels that is certainly true. 

To set up, I want you to let your mind wander through humanity’s technical accomplishments and ponder their meaning. Try to freely percolate through the astonishingly large heap of abstraction that is engineering, science, and mathematics. Begin to play it like a game of shoots and ladders, not with the goal of reaching the top but of examining each rung.

I get caught up in thoughts like that occasionally, more often than I would like to admit. Of course, I get nothing done in that mindset, as the whole purpose of abstraction is to allow us to work effectively without considering the whole chain. You don’t need to understand the quantum mechanics of semiconductors to write a computer program, and while I argue it is beneficial to be familiar with both, it is certainly not in our best interests to consider them all at once. The shear magnitude of what we’ve done is crippling.

The purpose of this article, is to talk about one of my conclusions from these shower thoughts. I ask you to ponder: what is the highest order of profession one can pursue? Consider all professions, not just engineers. Consider scientists, doctors, police officers, politicians, sanitation workers, fry cooks, artists, or whatever profession you can think of. 

I think you could guess that my answer would be an engineer, but I would like to be more specific about it. In my opinion, given this challenge I would answer the Material Engineer. In the title I say Material Scientist, but I use the two terms interchangeably as they embody the same idea, just different sides. They proudly straddle the grey and ambiguous line between theory and application, which is one reason (among many) why I put them at the top.

Before we continue, I think I should define exactly what I mean by Material Engineering. It is as follows:

Material Engineers have the responsibility of deeply understanding matter itself.  I know lots of disciplines have this responsibility, like most physicists and chemists, but the difference is that Material Engineers have the additional privilege of being able use it, to exploit it, to bend it into something we all touch everyday; only limited by their imaginations and the state of the art (physics too, I guess). 

Everything is made of something, and the laws that govern the smallest of things sum to form the laws of the largest of things. Material Scientist’s concern themselves with the lowest possible layer of abstraction known to Engineering. In this fashion I view all engineers and their associated technologies as either a subset of or abstraction upon the material.

If you ask an actual Material Scientist what they do, they might reference something called the material science triangle. It looks something like this:

The idea is that we constantly walk around this triangle, rigorously considering how the internal, microscopic structure of whatever material we work with affects its macroscopic properties, subsequently adjusting its processing in hopes of unlocking some desired or novel performance.

Some of these performances completely change the world. They form the cornerstone of all the glorious technology that surrounds us. They cyclically shake what we thought was possible and push us to greater and greater heights. And fortunately, this cycle does not only continue strongly today, but I argue it is in its most glorious days.

There is a reason we name various periods of our existence after materials. The stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, the silicon age, and there are speculations we might enter the carbon age. Each one is defined by our refined access to that specific material, and thus our ability to reap its technical benefits.

The most masterful modern Material Scientists walk around this world of ours having the ability to see all objects as a semi-structured array of atoms arranged in various orders of purpose. They not only see this fact, they understand all the forces involved in the object, intermolecular or otherwise. They understand how these forces affect its behaviour. And most importantly, they have an intuition for what they can do to manipulate these things for whatever purpose they choose. 

They understand the core principles governing everything they do. Whether watching the erasable dye of the Expo marker drying onto the polished whiteboard while scribbling equations, or enjoying the pleasure of breaking stuff (for science, of course). And if they don’t know the specific mechanics off the top of their head, they have the basis of understanding to swiftly Google it.

I know I aggrandize, but I believe these people have a superpower that others of different professions only get a glimpse of. 

Additionally, one of the things I love about this revelation is that this superpower actually has no apparent immediate purpose. Understanding what’s under the hood of our world isn’t necessarily useful in the traditional sense, as in a computer scientist building software to solve a specific problem. 

When I switched to Materials, it almost felt like I was making an argument similar to that of a History major. They might say, “Yeah, I probably won’t be a successful historian, but it’s important to have people who remember the past so we don’t repeat it, right?”

Analogously, my argument was “Yeah, I don’t fancy sitting in a lab and performing failure analysis for my career, but we have to remember everything is made of something, and whatever I end up doing will be augmented by my ability to understand what surrounds me, right?”

I have written articles about the greatness of engineering generalists, and I think the humble Material Engineer is the granddaddy of them all. So when you get a chance I urge you think about the materials that you live and work with, and maybe even attempt to integrate some of their principles into whatever you do. If nothing else it is super rewarding to understand exactly why steel is so strong or the tricky electrodynamics of semiconductors.

Depending on what you do it might seem like party trivia, but you might be surprised how it helps you. Even things that seem completely unrelated might be bridged by one of these properties, and with that knowledge you can fully examine things that maybe nobody else can even see.

If you liked this comically grandiose article, here are some other ones: