Tools for making materials: Introduction

One of the ironies of “materials research” is that there was no such thing until just the moment when the materials themselves became dispensable to research on materials. Until the mid-twentieth century, you needed to have some material stuff in order to do chemistry, the physics of solids and liquids, metallurgy, mineralogy, and similar investigations. Everything else in this volume you could do without - you could do quite good mineralogy, for instance, with the naked eye. But by the 1950s, the tables had turned. To do materials research you now needed expensive equipment, elaborate institutions, specially constructed buildings - but materials themselves were no longer absolutely necessary for materials research….