A Search for Structure

In the 1950s, Cyril Stanley Smith (Figure 10.1), a metallurgist who had played a leading part in the Manhattan project, engaged in what he called A Search for Structure, when he summarized his second career in a book. He had become an incomparable historian of the science and technology of materials. He also tried to formulate general ideas of form and organisation, to supplement or replace more traditional ones. Not all of nature, he insisted, is ordered, smooth, continuous. Much of it is disordered, rough and ragged, jagged and jerky. “Scientists have often overlooked the [true] form of the world.”