Why the story of materials is really

2024年2月10日发(作者：蘑菇浓汤的做法)

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？

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).

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.

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.

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 t

han 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.

举个例子，一根线，和头发同尺度存在。它是一种合成结构，在我们的视觉极限下，它让我们可以制作绳子、毯子、地毯，但最重要的是，衣服。纺织品是最早的合成材料之一；当我们穿着一条牛仔裤时，我们穿的是一个微型编织结构，其设计是古老的汉巨石阵。在所有有记录的历史中，衣服让我们保持温暖和受保护，就像我们让我们保持时尚一样。但他们也是高科技。在20世纪，我们学会了如何用足够坚固的纺织品制造宇航服，既能保护月球上的宇航员，又能制造用于假肢的固体纺织品，称为碳纤维复合材料。

But there is more to materials than the science. Tho who make things all have a different understanding of the practical, emotional and nsual aspect of their materials. For instance, we know the sounds of the doors in our hous, and can distinguish between someone leaving or entering from the subtle differences in keys rattling and hinges creaking. As a child

I could always tell whether it was my mother or my father coming up the stairs, from the subtle differences in the sound of the creaky stairs. The acoustic personalities of buildings are

often overlooked during the design process. Carpet makes a room feel warmer but also changes the acoustic signature of the room. The clickity-clack of high heels and the party they announce are muted; the squeak of rubber tennis soles and the sport they anticipate is banished; the comforting solid thump of nsible shoes on their way to work is no longer proclaimed. Installing carpet is a kind of auditory gag, which may of cour be ud intentionally for that purpo such as when designers want to create a n of intimacy and calm. It is this diversity of material knowledge that I intend to capture in the columns.

但是材料不仅仅是科学。那些制作东西的人对他们材料的实用性、情感和感官方面都有不同的理解。例如，我们知道房子里门的声音，并能从钥匙发出的咔嗒声和铰链发出的吱嘎声的细微差别中辨别出有人进来还是出去了。小时候，我总能从楼梯嘎吱作响的细微差别中分辨出是我妈妈还是我爸爸上楼来了。在设计过程中，建筑的这些声学特征经常被忽视。地毯让房间感觉更温暖，但也改变了房间的声学特征。高跟鞋的咔嗒咔嗒声和他们宣布的派对都是无声的；橡胶网球的吱吱声和他们期待的运动被摒弃了；明智的鞋子在上班路上发出的舒适而坚实的撞击声不再被宣扬。安装地毯是一种听觉上的恶作剧，当然也可能是有意为之，比如当设计师想要创造一种亲密和平静的感觉时。正是这种材料知识的多样性，我打算在这些专栏中加以总结。

Becau materials are built from atoms, we cannot avoid talking aboutthe rules that govern them, which are described by quantum mechanics. This means that as we enter the atomic world, we must abandon commonn, and talk instead of wave functions and electron states. More materials are being designed from scratch at this scale, and can perform emingly impossible tasks. Silicon chips designed using quantum mechanics have already brought about the information age. Silicon is now changing the way we light our homes (light emitting diodes) and harvest energy from the sun (solar cells).

因为材料是由原子构成的，我们不能避免谈论支配它们的规则，这些规则是由量子力学描述的。这意味着当我们进入原子世界时，我们必须放弃常识，转而谈论波函数和电子态。越来越多的材料正以这种规模从零开始设计，可以完成看似不可能的任务。使用量子力学设计

的硅片已经带来了信息时代。硅现在正在改变我们照亮家园(发光二极管)和从太阳(太阳能电池)获取能量的方式。

The central idea behind materials science is that changes at invisibly small scales manifest

themlves as changes in a material behaviour at the human scale. It is this process that our

ancestors stumbled upon to make bronze and steel, even though they did not have the microscopes to e what they were doing – an amazing achievement. When you hit a piece of

metal you are not just changing its shape, you are changing the inner structure of the metal, which is why metals get harder when you hit them. Our ancestors knew this from experience but didn’t know why. Nevertheless this gradual accumulation of knowledge got us to the 20th century before any real appreciation of the structure of materials was understood. In the columns I will be championing this skill of making. This is not just becau it is the hallmark of human civilisation but becau the deindustrialisation of the developed world has devalued making.

材料科学背后的中心思想是，无形小尺度的变化表现为人类尺度的材料行为的变化。我们的祖先就是在这个过程中偶然发现制造青铜和钢铁的，尽管他们没有麦克风和显微镜来观察他们在做什么——这是一个惊人的成就。当你击中一块金属时，你不仅改变了它的形状，你还改变了金属的内部结构，这就是为什么当你击中金属时，金属会变得更硬。我们的祖先从经验中知道这一点，但不知道为什么。尽管如此，这种知识的逐渐积累让我们来到了20世纪，才真正理解了材料的结构。在专栏中，我将支持这种制作技巧。这不仅仅是因为它是人类文明的标志，也是因为发达国家的去工业化摧毁了制造业。

Making is not just an economic activity, it is the equal of literature, performance or mathematics as a form of human expression. By eschewing material knowledge we cea to understand the world around us. We wring our hands about climate change or urban sprawl without any recognition that our ignorance of materiality might be the cau. We feel proud of the technological marvel that is a smartphone, and yet we upgrade – ditch one for a newer

model – at the first opportunity. We may assuage our conscience by hoping that they are recycled with some technology equal in sophistication to their fabrication techniques but they

are not; most are dispod of in industrial blenders.

制作不仅仅是一种经济活动，它相当于文学、表演或数学作为人类表达的一种形式。通过回避物质知识，我们停止了对周围世界的理解。我们对气候变化或城市扩张束手无策，却没有意识到我们对物质性的忽视可能是原因。我们为智能手机这一技术奇迹感到自豪，但我们一有机会就升级——放弃一款，改用新型号。我们可以通过希望它们用一些与它们的制造技术同等复杂的技术进行循环来减轻我们的良心，但它们不是；大多数在工业搅拌机中处理。

The ages of civilisation are named after materials precily becau they transformed and

shaped society. By distancing ourlves from the act of making,by buying and consuming stuff but never having any experience of their manufacture, the developed world finds itlf not to be the illiterate society that education ministers fear, but an unmakerly society. In my view this practical ignorance is every bit as dangerous to a modern democracy as a lack of literacy. By swapping a material and industrial understanding of the world for one bad on facts and information, we find ourlves uncivilid in a different way.

文明时代正是以物质命名的，因为它们改变和塑造了社会。通过与制造行为保持距离，通过购买和消费圣乌夫但从未有任何制造经验，发达国家发现自己不是教育部长们所害怕的文盲社会，而是一个不道德的社会。在我看来，这种实际上的无知对现代民主来说就像缺乏活力一样危险。通过把对世界的物质和工业理解换成基于fac ts和信息的理解，我们发现自己

以不同的方式不文明。

This ries of columns won’t be an exhaustive survey of materials, nor a catalogue of the

most important ones. But I will aim to capture the fabric of our lives through materiality. After all, everything is made of something.

这一系列专栏不会是对材料的详尽调查，也不会是最重要的材料的目录。但我的目标是通过物质性来捕捉我们生活的结构。毕竟，一切都是由某种东西构成的。