Physics – Physics Education
Scientific paper
May 1997
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997phyed..32..139c&link_type=abstract
Physics Education, Volume 32, Issue 3, pp. 139 (1997).
Physics
Physics Education
Scientific paper
We live in a highly materialistic age. This is true not only for our spiritual outlook - or lack of it - but undeniably so for the physical world in which we live. Materials, which are the feature of this special issue, provide literally the fabric on which the modern world is built. Materials science is the systematic study of the physical properties and behaviour of solids with practical applications and importance (if the utility of the material is not explicit or important we are probably in the realm of solid state physics!).
Materials in this sense are the stuff of which cars and computers, jet aircraft and washing machines, tower blocks and saucepans, bridges and golf clubs are made. The science of materials therefore encompasses most of the things that form the infrastructure of modern life. But perhaps it is its very ubiquity that removes the mystique, the glamour, the 'zing' from the subject. In contrast, anything cosmological, astronomical or 'fundamental' (as in 'particle'), i.e. of little or no practical significance to our day-to-day lives, excites the curiosity of many able young people. Witness the profusion of books about galaxies and black holes, and quarks and GUTs which strain the popular science shelves of the bookshops. I'm probably being heretical, but perhaps the over-hyping of the very large and the very small has indeed attracted the able few into the serious study of physics, but because of its inherent mathematical complexity and esoteric remoteness maybe it has put off the average youngster who would nevertheless enjoy and succeed in physics-based higher education (and, not incidentally, help fill the seriously depleted lecture theatres in many university physics - and engineering - departments).
Materials science on the other hand deals with an intermediate range of things which, give or take an order of magnitude or three, are person-sized as well as person useful. It is - therefore? - undoubtedly one of the less glamorous of the areas of physics-based science and technology. Can materials science be made intellectually more exciting and mind-stretching for our students?
In this special issue we present several articles by researchers in less-than-familiar but important areas of materials science and technology. Following a review by Mathew Philip of some of the basic atomic theory which underlies materials science, Jose Silva looks at how artificial diamonds can be made and at how we can apply this exotic material (other than on fingers and around necks). Alan Piercy reviews the field of giant magnetostrictive materials, which, when magnetized, change dimensions hundreds or even thousands of times more than traditional ferromagnetics. David Pettifor provides a nicely interdisciplinary overview of how computer simulations, from the subatomic to the macroscopic level, can be used to help in the design of new materials for such things as turbine blades.
Adrian Rennie offers a much-requested written version of the entertaining 1995/6 IOP Schools Lecture on the physics of polymers. (We had hoped to include an article by Professor Colin Gough of Birmingham University on High Temperatue Superconductors, but for technical reasons this has had to be postponed until a future issue.)
Finally, there are two articles describing an initiative which will have a direct practical impact on the teaching and learning of `Materials' in the UK. Karen Davies describes the exciting new Materials Gallery due to be opened at the Science Museum as this issue goes to press in May 1997 (no coincidence!), and David Sang provides details of how the new gallery has been linked directly with the GNVQ curriculum, and can certainly be exploited more widely in our physics and technology teaching. Perhaps this can help provide the missing 'zing' that materials science at present seems to lack.
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