Why the story of materials is really the story of civilisation?
为什么物质的故事真的是文明的故事？
声母有几个Everything is made of something. Take away concrete, glass, textiles, metal, and the other materials from our lives and we are left naked, shivering in a muddy field. The sophistication of our lives is in a large part bestowed by material wealth, we would quickly revert to animal behaviour without the stuff of our civilisation: what makes us human is our clothes, our homes, our cities, our things, which we animate through our customs and language. This becomes very apparent if you ever visit a disaster zone. Thus the material world is not just a display of our technology and culture, it is part of us, we invented it, we made it and it makes us who we are. 一切都是由某种东西构成的。把混凝土、玻璃、纺织品、金属和其他材料从我们的生活中拿走，我们就赤身裸体，在泥泞的田野里瑟瑟发抖。我们生活中的诡辩在很大程度上是由物质财富赋予的，如果没有我们文明的东西，我们会很快回复到万物有灵的行为:使我们成为人类的是我们的衣服、我们的家庭、我们的城市、我们的事物，我们通过我们的习俗和语言赋予它们生命。如果你去过灾区，这一点就很明显了。因此，物质世界不仅仅是我们技术和文化的展示，它是我们的一部分，我们发明了它，我们创造了它，它造就了我们。
The fundamental importance of materials is made clear from the naming of ages of civilisations – the stone, iron and bronze ages – with each new era being brought about by a new material. Iron and steel were the defining materials of the Victorian era, allowing engineers to give full rein to their dreams of creating suspension bridges, railways, steam engines and pasnger liners. Isambard Kingdom Brunel ud them as a manifesto to transform the landscape and sow the eds of modernism. The 20th century is often hailed as the age of silicon, after the breakthrough in materials science that ushered in the silicon chip and the information revolution. Yet a kaleidoscope of other new materials also revolutionid modern living. Architects took mass-produced sheet glass and combined it with structural steel to produce skyscrapers that invented a new type of city life. Plastics transformed our homes and dress. Polymers were ud to produce celluloid and ushered in a new visual culture, the cinema. The development of aluminium alloys and nickel superalloys enabled us to fly cheaply and accelerated the collision of cultures. Medical and dental ceramics allowed us to rebuild ourlves and redefine disability and ageing – and as the term "plastic surgery" implies, materials are often the key to new treatments ud to repair our faculties (hip replacements) or enhance our features (silicone implants for breast enlargement).
忠孝双全>甲午中日海战材料的根本重要性从文明时代的命名中变得清晰起来——石器时代、铁器时代和青铜时代——每个新时代都是由一种新材料带来的。钢铁是维多利亚时代的决定性材料，这使得工程师们可以充分发挥他们创造吊桥、铁路、蒸汽机和客轮的梦想。伊桑巴德·金德姆·布鲁内尔用它们作为宣言来改造大地景观，播下现代主义的种子。20世纪通常被誉为硅的时代，因为材料科学的突破带来了硅芯片和信息革命。然而，其他新材料的万花筒也给现代生活带来了革命性的变化。建筑师们采用大规模生产的平板玻璃，并将其与结构钢结合起来，制造出摩天大楼，从而创造出一种新的城市生活方式。塑料改变了我们的家庭和着装。聚合物被用来生产赛璐珞，并开创了一种新的视觉文化——电影。铝合金和镍超合金的发展使我们能够廉价飞行，并加速了文化的碰撞。医学和牙科陶瓷让我们能够重塑自我，重新定义残疾和衰老——正如“整形外科”一词所暗示的那样，材料通常是用于修复我们的官能(髋关节置换)或增强我们的特征(隆胸硅胶植入物)的新疗法的关键。
My obssion with materials started as a teenager. I was puzzled by their obscurity, despite being all around us. How many people can spot the difference between aluminium and steel? Woods are clearly different from one another, but how many people can say why? Plastics are confusing; who knows the difference between polythene and polypropylene? Eventually I enrolled in a degree at Oxford University material science department, went on to do a PhD in jet engine alloys and am now professor of materials and society and director of the Institute of Making at University College London. On my journey I have found a hidden world of makers who create the stuff on which we all rely, from aircraft manufacturers to clothing makers. Materials are at the heart of every company I visit and it is hard not to conclude that although Google and Twitter may dominate technology headlines, and cosmologists may be most popular with the media, materials transformation is still what makes the world go around.西安儿童公园
艺字取名
我对材料的痴迷是从十几岁开始的。我对他们的默默无闻感到困惑，因为他们就在我们周围。有多少人能看出铝和鳗鱼的区别？树林明明各不相同，可又有几个人能说出为什么呢？
Plast ics比较混乱；谁知道聚乙烯和聚丙烯的区别？最终，我获得了牛津大学材料科学系的学位，继续攻读喷气发动机合金博士学位，现在是伦敦大学学院材料与社会教授和制造学院院长。在我的旅程中，我发现了一个隐藏的制造商的世界，他们制造我们所有人都依赖的东西，从飞机制造商到服装制造商。材料是我访问的每家公司的核心，很难不得出这样的结论:尽管谷歌和推特可能占据技术头条，宇宙学家可能最受媒体欢迎，但材料变革仍然是世界运转的动力。
Starting next week in a new ries of columns for Obrver Tech Monthly I am going to tell the story of stuff. Each month I will pick a different material and uncover the human needs and desires that brought it into being, and decode the materials science and engineering behind it. Along the way, we will find that the real differences between materials are deep below the surface, a world that is shut off from most unless they have access to sophisticated scientific equipment. So to understand materiality is necessarily a journey into the inner space of materials. Pretty much the whole of materials science is concerned with the microscopic worlds. Doing so explains why some materials smell and others are odourless; why some can last for 1,000 years and others crumble in the sun; how some glass can be bulletproof, while a wine glass shatters at the slightest impact. The journey into this microscopic world reveals the science behind our food, our clothes, our gadgets, our jewellery, and of cour our bodies.
雅尔塔在哪
不字的笔顺从下周开始，在《观察者科技月刊》的一系列新专栏中，我将讲述这个故事。每个月，我都会挑选一种不同的材料，揭示人类的需求和欲望，并解码材料科学和工程来找到它。在这个过程中，我们会发现材料之间的真正区别是在表面以下很深的地方，一个与大多数人隔绝的世界，除非他们能够接触到复杂的科学设备。因此，理解物质性必然是一次进入物质内部空间的旅程。几乎整个材料科学都与微观世界有关。这样做解释了为什么有的物质有气味，有的物质无气味；为什么有些能持续1000年，而另一些却在阳光下崩溃；一些玻璃是如何防弹的，当阿乐的酒杯在轻微的撞击下破碎。进入这个微观世界的旅程揭示了我们的食物、衣服、小玩意、珠宝背后的科学，当然还有我们的灵魂。
Take for example, a piece of thread, which exists at the same scale as hair. It is a synthetic structure at the limit of our eyesight that has allowed us to make ropes, blankets, carpets, but most importantly, clothes. Textiles are one of the earliest synthetic materials; when we wear a pair of jeans we are wearing a miniature woven structure, the design of which is older than Stonehenge. Clothes have kept us warm and protected for all of recorded history, as well keeping us fashionable. But they are hi-tech too. In the 20th century we learnt how to make space suits from textiles strong enough to protect astronauts on the moon as well as solid textiles for artificial limbs called carbon fibre composites.
