Essays
Essays on materials science, engineering, and the history of science. Each post explores a specific problem, paper, or concept.
- Systems engineering in materials design Replacing one element in an alloy forces changes to processing, structure, and performance all at once. This post introduces the PSPP framework and the systems concepts behind it. If the chain from processing to performance is causal in both directions, it can be read backward, turning material substitution into a design problem.
- The discovery of the rare earth elements How chemists identified the 17 rare earth elements over more than a century and a half, from Gadolin's discovery of yttria in 1794 to the isolation of promethium in 1947.
- The case for history in scientific training Scientific training treats the history of the field as decoration. A working researcher is better off with some of it than without, because the ways good science has been dismissed and bad science accepted repeat, and only the historical record makes the patterns visible.
- The structure and metastability of glass Glass is amorphous, metastable, and undergoes a gradual rather than sharp transition from liquid to solid. This post covers the structure, the thermodynamics, and the glass transition.
- Vannevar Bush on managing large-scale R&D Vannevar Bush ran the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, coordinating the American work on radar, the proximity fuse, and the scaled production of penicillin. His memoir of that work is a management manual for anyone running large-scale research programs.