Materials Research And Its Toolkit

Physical Sciences Janskerkhof 2-3, Rm. 013 Organized Session

24 Jul 2019 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM(Europe/Amsterdam)

20190724T1330 20190724T1530 Europe/Amsterdam Materials Research and Its Toolkit Materials research has contributed to pervasive, profound, yet largely invisible changes to both society in general and the sciences in particular. From computers to nuclear reactors, many high technologies – including the technologies of theory and experiment – require advanced materials. Yet we have no systematic history of materials research, despite ground-breaking work by scholars such as Klaus Hentschel and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. There is, however, general agreement that characterization and fabrication tools play an important role in nucleating communities of materials researchers, and that the institutions of materials research (professional societies, journals, funding streams, etc.) orient strongly to innovation in the tools of materials research. But what are the tools of materials research, and how have they co-evolved with materials science and related fields that arose in the postwar era? Over the past two years we have organized a collection of essays on the history of tools in materials research, which this panel samples. We use an expansive definition of "tools," from the obvious to the less so. Obvious tools include apparatus for making and inspecting new materials under laboratory conditions: advanced furnaces, sputterers, spectrometers, microscopes, etc. Less obvious tools include the infrastructure of experimentation: standards, lab safety practices and regulations, laboratory buildings. We also examine tools that are so ancient and ubiquitous that they are taken for granted by the policymakers and practitioners of materials research alike: glassware, recipes, balances, etc. Taking these categories highlights the mutual evolution of tools, materials, and research communities. Organized by Joseph Martin Janskerkhof 2-3, Rm. 013 History of Science Society 2019 meeting@hssonline.org

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Materials research has contributed to pervasive, profound, yet largely invisible changes to both society in general and the sciences in particular. From computers to nuclear reactors, many high technologies – including the technologies of theory and experiment – require advanced materials. Yet we have no systematic history of materials research, despite ground-breaking work by scholars such as Klaus Hentschel and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. There is, however, general agreement that characterization and fabrication tools play an important role in nucleating communities of materials researchers, and that the institutions of materials research (professional societies, journals, funding streams, etc.) orient strongly to innovation in the tools of materials research. But what are the tools of materials research, and how have they co-evolved with materials science and related fields that arose in the postwar era? Over the past two years we have organized a collection of essays on the history of tools in materials research, which this panel samples. We use an expansive definition of "tools," from the obvious to the less so. Obvious tools include apparatus for making and inspecting new materials under laboratory conditions: advanced furnaces, sputterers, spectrometers, microscopes, etc. Less obvious tools include the infrastructure of experimentation: standards, lab safety practices and regulations, laboratory buildings. We also examine tools that are so ancient and ubiquitous that they are taken for granted by the policymakers and practitioners of materials research alike: glassware, recipes, balances, etc. Taking these categories highlights the mutual evolution of tools, materials, and research communities.

Organized by Joseph Martin

Too Many Cook(books) Spoil the Broth: Handbooks as Objects of Disciplinary DivisionView Abstract

Organized SessionPhysical Sciences 01:30 PM - 02:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 11:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 12:00:00 UTC

Handbooks and manuals are where the knowledge and practices of a discipline accumulate. In their use, professional standards can be disseminated and enforced. But even in their rejection handbooks be used to construct disciplinary boundaries. This paper offers a historical example documenting the tenuousness of a manual’s authority and role as an instrument of professionalization. In the early twentieth century, disciplinary boundaries were being created within the larger field of industrial chemistry. Denouncing the use of manuals, pejoratively termed “cook books,” helped to solidify professional prestige among individual or groups of industrial chemists through the exclusion of chemical technicians, in part along gendered lines. The rejection of “cook books” for use in research or industry soon extended into a rejection of their use for education. Although handbooks are no longer an object of common contention among scientists, the term “cook book laboratory” has lasted to the present day among science education reformers.

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New Tools for Making New MaterialsView Abstract

Organized SessionPhysical Sciences 02:00 PM - 02:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 12:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 12:30:00 UTC

There is no bright line between representing and intervening – even microscopes can be used to, for instance, fabricate atomically-precise devices. Yet materials scientists routinely make a rough distinction between tools associated with characterization and those associated with fabrication. In general, historians and philosophers have paid more attention to the latter, perhaps because they were more easily folded into debates about representation and reality. In the past few years that tide has slowly changed, with recent studies of (among others) experimental refrigeration by Joanna Radin and ion implantation and molecular beam epitaxy by David Brock and collaborators. In this paper I review the various fabrication techniques that our collection examines. I use that survey to argue that in the Cold War, policymakers and many materials researchers themselves focused on fabrication techniques relevant to four domains of application: missiles/space, nuclear weapons/energy, computing, and oil. I quickly review a representative fabrication apparatus – Rick Smalley’s AP2, which enabled the Nobel-winning discovery of buckminsterfullerene – and its links to all four of those domains. Researchers allied with these four domains were both producers and consumers of new fabrication techniques. Indeed, the desire to move new tools across interlinked domains was one of the hallmarks of postwar materials research. Since the end of the Cold War, a new domain has become increasingly prominent: life. Biological systems were never absent from materials research, but since the 1990s their importance has increased – both as parts of fabrication apparatus, and as drivers of innovation in fabrication apparatus.

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Knowing MaterialsView Abstract

Organized SessionPhysical Sciences 02:30 PM - 03:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 12:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 13:00:00 UTC

If you can spray them then they are real” is Ian Hacking’s pithy answer to the question of when we should believe in the existence of microscopic entities we cannot see. Much history and philosophy of science has concerned the second half of Hacking’s slogan. Historians have investigated how scientists came to believe in things like electrons, neutrons, and photons. Philosophers have wondered what it means to build science around belief in unobservable entities. But the first half of the quote hints at other, more rarely told stories. When we spray electrons, or neutrons, or photons, how do we spray them? At what? To what end? The history and philosophy of science have said a great deal about the things we spray, but much less about how and why we spray them. This talk discusses the 20th-century tools that provided new insights into the characteristics of materials, and thereby redefined what scientist mean when they talk about materials. Materials are often distinguished from other matter because they can be or have been turned to human purposes. Nothing about that definition requires a robust scientific understanding of materials have useful properties. The proliferation of tools for characterizing materials brought that knowledge within grasp. These tools helped fuse the many traditions of materials research into a new, interdisciplinary field of materials science. In doing so, they made knowledge of the inner workings of matter essential to the concept of materials as the substances that humans use to achieve their aims and desires.

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Panel Discussion: Materials Research and Its ToolkitView Abstract

Organized SessionPhysical Sciences 03:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 13:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 13:30:00 UTC

A panel discussion with the audience.

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