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Comment by Giroflex | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how lifeforms can mold materials into shapes and states we'd otherwise never think of, or that maybe would even be impossible to produce. The strong silk some spiders make is another example.

Leads me to think that there are a lot of undiscovered properties of materials that could potentially be unlocked by engineering different life forms. We're pretty far from exploring all the possibilities in manufacturing techniques.

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This is related to another burning question I have (maybe someone knows): why aren't more resources, students, professionals focused on material sciences?

I have friends in AI, biotech, clean tech, web/apps, robotics, but none in material sciences. And yet materials are so important technologically that we name ages after them (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age). I lived in "Silicon Valley" even — our industries and progress are so tied to materials, why isn't there more of a focus on material science?

No easy money. It’s hard to find new useful materials and you have to find an area to use it in, and it’s probably expensive while doing it. It’s easier if you already have a problem to solve than finding a problem that you can solve indirectly.

>> why isn't there more of a focus on material science?

There is. A huge example of one that has a lot of crossover is battery and energy storage technology, which at its core, is material science.

3d printing is more popular now than ever before and continues to rise in popularity. SpaceX prints their SuperDraco rocket engine entirely out of Inconel [0], which is a good example of a major breakthrough in material science.

The "scientists" you seek often wear welding aprons, face shields, and are creating stuff. The material science revolution is what we call the "Maker" revolution.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconel

There is. It's just that materials science is a bona fide Hard Problem that requires tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in lab equipment (synchrotrons, free electron lasers, the good stuff), supercomputers etc. to advance, so it's studied by top universities, National Labs and so forth. It's not really something you can "disrupt".

Nevertheless, there have been recent claims that it is being disrupted, by the current buzzwords, AI and machine learning.

See: https://www.nature.com/news/can-artificial-intelligence-crea...

There are a ton of headlines about material science! Stealth planes, graphene, invisibility cloak, Bucky balls, vantablack, plant-based polymers, biodiesel, these are off the top of my head. What else are you looking for?

MIT retains an explicit Materials Science department. It was one of the original 1860s departments called Mining Engineering and Metalurgy, but changed its name when geology was spun off as a science department in the 1940s.

As does Cambridge (Materials Science & Metallurgy). I recently had a friend complete a PhD in Materials Science.

https://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/

I think because the path forward is so unclear and the field is so broad. Advances in material science come from left field -- no amount of playing around with bronze is going to make you spontaneously aware of the amazing properties of iron and steel.

We're constantly learning things in the semiconductor space, the battery space, and especially in ceramics, both industrial and superconductors, but almost all the initial breakthroughs came from curious people who had a "that's odd" moment when studying something unrelated.

Even the development of tin and copper working is suspected to be a side effect of better pottery ("hey, what are these little hard things in my kiln that came out of that strange rock") and iron working is suspected to be a side effect of better glass ("hey, what are those hard things in my furnace that came out of that strange rock").

There is - the material is silicon and related materials and all those things you mentioned are built with and made possible by advancements in silicon technologies. There's an IBM article on the front of this very site detailing how they are creating artificial neutrals from silicon for AI. I would argue the period we're in now will be referred to as the Silicon Age.

Sometimes I find myself in a state of mind that is more commonly achieved by other people with drugs, where contemplating something mundane in a new way amazes me.

One example is I was thinking about path dependence in manufacturing or growing things. If you take a large handful of dry spaghetti, you can break it fairly consistently in half. But if you cook it first, there is no way to split all the strands in half any more.

The O(n) Spaghetti Sort also requires dry spaghetti: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort

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