Editorial: “Are we in the Metamaterial Age?“
See more in our gallery: “Know your stuff: Collect our pick of material wonders“
THE STRANGER’S muscles strained against his shirt as he hefted the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. “Wanna see what I’ve got?” he asked in a low Texan drawl, inviting the woman to follow him to a place where “no one would get hurt”.
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To someone less worldly wise than Zoe Laughlin, this encounter at a conference in San Antonio might have seemed a little sinister. For her, though, it is all part of the job. Laughlin is one of a team at University College London’s that is building up “a wonder chamber that celebrates the material world”. The Materials Library, which is due to open this week, includes crying metals, a sponge for comet dust, living concrete – and the contents of a handcuffed Texan’s briefcase.
The idea started with Laughlin’s colleague . In the early 2000s he was just down the road at King’s College London, where he had a semi-famous office drawer. “People started visiting just to look at what was in the drawer, not to visit me,” he says.
Inside was an eclectic mix of materials he had collected. One was a wafer of aluminium nitride. Typically found inside electronic devices, this pale, smooth material performs a party trick beloved of materials scientists. Its thermal conductivity is unusually high, so if you pick up a wafer, it shuttles heat from your hand. Brush its edge across an ice cube, and the wafer will melt the ice and cut clean through it.
In 2005, Laughlin, then an artist with an interest in materials, was passing Miodownik’s office when she noticed a poster on his door for an exhibition she was planning to go to. The two really hit it off when Laughlin revealed she also owned a cache of strange stuff: cork, sugar cubes, hair. Eventually, along with designer of Goldsmiths, University of London, they decided to build a much bigger collection.
Several privately run material repositories and databases aimed at artists and architects have emerged in the past few years. Materia, based in the Netherlands, has a . has collections in New York and elsewhere. But Conreen, Laughlin and Miodownik had a different ambition: to build a collection that speaks of the changing relationship between humans and the things we make and use. “Materials are like characters in a book. They tell the story of civilisation,” says Miodownik. Every time we find a new way of rearranging atoms, it changes what we can do: sometimes in a small way, sometimes by defining an age in bronze, steel or silicon.
The first incarnation of the Materials Library, deep in a basement of King’s College, did justice to that history. When Â鶹´«Ă˝ visited last year, it was like a Victorian apothecary’s shop with its racks of tiny vials, as well as a drawer full of fluorescent things and shelves packed with strange objects – a lump of raw rubber, a Bakelite telephone, a radioactive fruit bowl made from uranium glass.
The expanded library has roughly 1500 materials, and counting. Among Laughlin’s highlights is silica aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids. “It makes a squeaky sound like polystyrene,” she says. “And it’s beautiful.” Dubbed blue smoke, it appears strangely fuzzy owing to the way it scatters shorter wavelengths of light. NASA in the spacecraft, which rendezvoused with comet Wild 2 in 2004. The material’s excellent thermal insulation properties have since seen it spun out into architectural uses.
Squishy and impermanent
Then there is self-healing concrete. If a tiny crack forms in a building made of this stuff, water seeping in will activate dormant Bacillus bacteria, which produce calcite and seal the gap. The material’s inventors, at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, hope to commercialise it in the next two or three years.
The materials in the library are not categorised in traditional groups like metals or plastics. Instead, they are simply ordered according to when they were collected; first on the inventory is a set of jars containing all the elements of the periodic table. The idea is that they can be browsed according to more human factors like squishiness, danger, impermanence, the red ones and so on.
Take tin. It is a metal, and malleable – but you could also class it as “noisy”. Bend a bar and you will hear a “. “Suddenly you’re down at the microscopic level asking why,” says Laughlin. The answer lies in the hexagonal shape of the metal’s layered crystals. As the bar flexes they do not slide over each other smoothly, but jump and grind.
Such unquantifiable characteristics, along with subjective factors of feel, taste and smell, have often been ignored, says Miodownik. That doesn’t matter for designers of jet engines, but it can for materials inside buildings, on consumer gadgets or woven into clothes. An architect might want to create a space that feels “warm”, for example, or a clothes designer might want to know what new materials will feel like without trying them all on. The library’s curators are pioneering studies of the properties of materials – how our subjective perceptions of them relate to well-known, measurable properties.
One of their findings is that the perceived warmth of wood compared with metal reflects the wood’s lower thermal effusivity, essentially a measure of how quickly it transfers heat. A little less obviously, perception of hardness is linked to a material’s elastic modulus, which quantifies how it deforms (). The idea is that a designer selecting a material to elicit a particular sensory response might use this knowledge as a shortcut.
Access to the library will initially be by appointment, with monthly open days. Visitors will be encouraged to contribute to the sensoaesthetic research by touching, sniffing and even licking the materials.
“Visitors to the library will be encouraged to touch, sniff and even lick the materials”
And what of the mysterious Texan? Once he and Laughlin were in a safe place – a sports hall attached to the conference venue – the man unclipped his case to reveal a set of polished black spheres the size of snooker balls.
Any doubt as to their identity was dispelled when the stranger launched one at the wall. Chips flew off the bricks, yet as the ball thudded to the floor, its surface was as smooth as ever. The ball was made of silicon nitride, a substance whose hardness makes steel seem like putty, and which has an incredibly low-friction surface. Oil companies use small spheres of the stuff as bearings in high-pressure drills, as did NASA inside the space shuttle engine. Each black globe was worth thousands of dollars – hence the stranger’s handcuffs.
“Wanna bit?” he asked Laughlin with a grin. She did.
This article appeared in print under the headline “That’s the stuff”
