Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century
Ball's (Designing the Molecular World, LJ 5/15/94) far-reaching work takes the reader on a long, strange, sometimes tedious, often difficult trip through the arcane world of new materials?the stuff scientists and engineers have created, or are speculating about, for propelling the high-technology boom to new heights. Ball thoroughly explores the use of what he calls advanced materials in the fields of photonics (which, he argues, will entirely replace electronics one day), information storage, biomedicine, and energy, to name a few. Something he calls smart materials will eventually replace whole machines: "[Imagine] a smart valve [that] is no more than a tube through which the fluid passes; when the flow exceeds [some] critical value, the material of the tube expands until it pinches off the flow." There are lots of good photographs and schematics for aiding the sometimes dizzying exposition. Most appropriate for interested readers with a college-level background in chemistry and physics.?Robert C. Ballou, AtlantaCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.