Made to measure
Subtitle: new materials for the 21st century
By: Philip Ball.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 458
Subjects: Materials -- Technological innovations.
Description: Made to Measure introduces a general audience to one of today's most exciting areas of scientific research: materials science. Philip Ball describes how scientists are currently inventing thousands of new materials, ranging from synthetic skin, blood, and bone to substances that repair themselves and adapt to their environment, that swell and flex like muscles, that repel any ink or paint, and that capture and store the energy of the Sun.

He shows how all this is being accomplished precisely because, for the first time in history, materials are being "made to measure": designed for particular applications, rather than discovered in nature or by haphazard experimentation. Now scientists literally put new materials together on the drawing board in the same way that a blueprint is specified for a house or an electronic circuit.

But the designers are working not with skylights and alcoves, not with transistors and capacitors, but with molecules and atoms.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [429]-444) and index.