Designing a New Material World

In this month9s essay, Gregory B. Olson of Northwestern University traces the routes of modern materials science and engineering, from the medieval alchemists9 attempts to transmute base metals into gold to the modern materials engineer9s use of complex processing to "transmute" the multilevel microstructure of materials to achieve the essential property of gold, namely, economic value. The emerging "systems approach," he contends, is leading researchers beyond an era of empirical discovery into a new "Age of Design," marked by the systematic invention of new, more capable materials.