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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:

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"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

Reply to
Bret Cahill
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Not any type of alloys guy or composites guy, though. More like physicists and chemists.

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.

Reply to
Mark Thorson

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:

Reply to
jbuch

. . .

Reply to
Bret Cahill

materials

equation

payback

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

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For a good discussion of the material, see
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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

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Reply to
metalengr

More childish reactions, as anticipated.

Reply to
jbuch

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