Question: why do you say that material science is 'critical to our society'?

Daniel Roach answered on 12 Mar 2014:

I’ll copy in the answer to a similar question:

The history of mankind’s technological progress is the history of the materials we used in shaping our world around us – The stone age, we learned to shape stone and build with it (we don’t talk about the ‘wood age’ or the ‘bone age’, but prehistoric man might be best described in that way). Bronze age, we used simple alloys of copper and tin (bronze), iron age, we learned to use iron and steel (iron with small amounts of carbon in it). The industrial age was all about the mass-use and mass production of steels – making engines and machines from this strong stuff.

And now… The information age is all based on silicon chips, wafers of precision grown crystalline silicon. With the advent of graphene (single layers of graphite), we hope to create atom-level computers. With nanotechnology, buckballs and nanotubes, we hope to be able to create tiny machines that could go into your body and deliver drugs or repair/destroy individual cells (like cancer cells or faulty organs). Or we could repair blood vessels using nanotubes.

But in order to do this, we need to be able to understand how the atoms behave – and sometimes they do unpredicable things unless you study these crystals very carefully – then you get to understand how things work.

Microscopic computers. Targetted drugs. New ways of storing energy. New, clever materials ten times stronger than steel and as light as a feather.

As someone who studies the basic properties of these new materials, I am helping to build this new technology, because the science of understanding the materials is important in predicting and designing new, clever materials