Nobel Prize for Materials Science

About 4 years ago I was so frustrated with the empiricism of materials I posted my pipe dream about an alloy calculator: www.alloypredict.com. "Just put in the composition and out comes that material properties." I received an Email from someone approving of my "sense of humor." Materials will drive people to such desperation they will click on anything.
A couple of years later some Japanese actually came up with an equation or program or something that could predict properties of some alloys based on composition. This needs to be encouraged.
Some computer billionire needs to fund an annual award to anyone who can help clean up this awful mess with a few good broad sweeping generalizations that would make life easier for designers. The payback would be much more effective than medical research. After all, it was some materials guy who invented the chip.
A lot of engineers really wonder how something as critical as materials "science" -- actually just a menagerie of completely unrelated facts -- has managed to retain its dark ages backwards wichcraft voodoo encyclopedic nature late into the info age.
I have no conflicts of interest with this suggestion. I can guarantee I'm not going to be on any short or long list.
Bret Cahill

Bret Cahill wrote:
  Quoted Text Here  
Not any type of alloys guy or composites guy, though. More like physicists and chemists.
  Quoted Text Here  
Electrochemistry is far worse -- even basic stuff like brighteners in electroplating and activators in electroless plating are not fully understood. Why do plating bath chemistries include weird stuff like saccharin and artificial food coloring? Some progress has been made to how these additives work, but much is still a black art. It's not helped by the aura of secrecy and craft knowhow around these subjects.
And, electrochemistry is much more important to chip manufacture than alloys or composite materials.

. . .
<Electrochemistry is far worse -- even basic stuff like <brighteners in electroplating and activators in electroless <plating are not fully understood. Why do plating bath <chemistries include weird stuff like saccharin and artificial <food coloring?
Someone needs to make a list of all these fields that are begging to be quantified.
Where is Galileo when you really need him?
Medical science must be the worst of all. I gooooooooooogled "cyst" once and got so many hits I decided it would be better to just die of cancer.
Even the way they present the information would drive any normal person crazy:
". . . the second largest saliva gland . . ."
When you try to get into the medical mindset it gets even crazier:
"SECOND largest gland?!? Well if it isn't the LARGEST gland, we [my cyst and I] just aren't going to play!"
Bret Cahill

Childish playground taunting.
Come back once a year. It would be interesting to see if you grow up.
I am betting $10 against significant maturity gains in the near term.
Bret Cahill wrote:
  Quoted Text Here  

<
<Childish playground taunting.
Someone's got to be the heavy and crack the whip.
: ~ )
Actually it may be the nature of Nature that makes materials science hard to deal with.. Chemists keep coming up with new periodic charts of the elements because they aren't satisfied with the old ones.
On the other hand it may be a flaw in the human brain. We just didn't evolve to figure out some fields out as well as thermodynamics.
But we shouldn't summarily rule out the possibility that the materials answer to Gauss or Newton just hasn't appeared yet.
Bret Cahill
"Nature is just being a difficult."
-- Bret Cahill

Bret Cahill wrote:
  Quoted Text Here  
More childish reactions, as anticipated.

Bret Cahill wrote:
  Quoted Text Here  
materials
that
my
they
equation
payback
was
materials
--
guarantee
The subject line of your post displays your ignorance of materials science and metallurgical engineering.
Actually there was one Nobel prize awarded already for the development of a material, one crucially important to metrology and other precision engineering.
The 1920 Nobel prize in physics went to Charles-Edouard Guillaume for development of the low expansion iron-nickel Invar alloy. See http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1920/press.html
For a good discussion of the material, see http://crswnew.cartech.com/wnew/TechArticles/TA00008.html
Invar was a simple material in the sense that only one property (expansion coefficient) was being manipulated. For most engineering materials there are several properties to be controlled, and some or most of them depend on both composition and microstructure.
Materials science is sitting on top of the pre-existing empiricism of metallurgical engineering.
Pittsburgh Pete
---------------------- Disclaimer
We do not believe what we write, and neither should you. Information furnished to you is for topical (external) use only. This information may not be worth any more than either a groundhog turd, or what you paid for it (nothing). The author may not even have been either sane or sober when he wrote it down. Do not worry, be happy.

<<
<The subject line of your post displays your
< ignorance of materials science
Obviously. That's just restating the problem.
The solution is to make materials more user friendly to those of us who are encyclopedic knowledge challenged.
Right now you guys have us by the short ones. This needs to be changed.
Bret Cahill