Customer Reviews

Made to Measure: New Materials for the 21st Century

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This is a very delightful book. The author is excellent at covering technical details in a charming recounting of the evolutiion of ideas and his depth of knowledge is impressive. This was a labor of love and it shows in all the details. There are many pictures and graphics that compliment the text and these help to keep the reader pushing for more. It is a comprehensive yet story-like overview.Makes you feel well informed enough to consider designing smarter materials yourself........

This is a well done book.
Its not a technical book (but good pointers) yet not non-technical popular-mechanics type work. This book describes what science is pretty much all about! Its easy to get bogged down in your own world of work so a book such as this helps get your eyes open to the possibilities of the opportunites that come from hard, hard work. :)

This book talks about whats going on at the molecular level of things (my version is 1997). For the non-specialist this book is just great though I suppose if you work in micro-optics or semi/super conductors you might find that research is moving on a bit.

things discussed:
Optics (photonic material), superconductors, medicine & applications: biomaerials (chapt 4 - my fav), biomedical materials (cool), polymers, smart materials. energy, and more.

there is also a rather extensive bibliography so you can look for more info with Google.com(r) or other site.

Philip Ball argues for the increasing importance of materials in the future and does so eloquently and clearly. He invites the layman into the complexities of material science and sparks great interest in this field without burdening the audience with superfluous technical detail. This is a must-read for those curious about the future of engineering as a whole!

Just as the 20th century has been often described as the information age, it might also be described as the age of materials. At the beginning of the 20th century, our technology was based mostly on materials harvested and refined from nature. Milled lumber, iron, copper, and alloys of common metals. Fabrics were all derived from plans and animals with very little processing.

Early in the past century a revoution started to develop in materials technology, as scientists and engineers began to experiment with creating molecules and structures not found in naturally occuring materials. At the molecular lever, chemists created long-chain polymers that had some of the characteristics of natural materials, but greatly improved resistence to wear and temperature. At the macroscopic level, materials were combined into composites like plywood and epoxy reinforced fiberglass. New structures unseen in nature, like matrixes of carbon and boron fibers embedded in metals, became possible. By the end of the century, it was possible to start moving around individual atoms to create entirely new materials with designer properties.

Ball's narrative covers both the history of materials science, and the future and its possibilities. He's particularly good at the historical story, and at drawing parallels betwene natural and artifial structures. As in Ball's other popular works on science, "Made to Measure" is approachable without being trivial, and rigorous in its attention to detail without becoming numbingly pedantic. This is a book that would serve admiribly as either an introduction for the educated reader or a supplimentary text in an introductory materials engineer course.

A unique book that presents a comprehensive and modern overview of new materials in both scientific and popular ways at the same time. It is so nicely written that you can read it as a novel. Philip Ball managed to put a truly encyclopedic knowledge in a single book. A "must have" book for every person who is dealing with new materials.

In this timely, overdue contribution to the literature, Ball offers a lucid, balanced, comprehensive, and up-to-date perspective of a field in constant fluidity and evolution. This feat alone causes a stir but his enthusiastic and intelligent delivery, utter groundswell. I recommend this book to everyone!

Although materials science is a fast-evolving discipline, and even though this book was written 10 years ago, it is still an important and useful contribution. Philip Ball has taken a diverse and interdisciplinary science and created a book that is both readable, interesting, and informative, no matter what your level of scientific literacy.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a materials scientist, so I may not be the best person to comment on the book's readability to the layman. There is some technical vocabulary. It is always explained, but someone without a clear idea of the basic building blocks of matter (atoms, molecules, electrons, etc.) a reader will find this book a heavy slog. However, there is nothing in the book above the scientific literacy level of high-school chemistry and physics. Anything more advanced is explained in a conversational and coherent manner, without ever resorting to distorting approximations that riddle newspaper accounts of science.

What makes this book especially valuable is that the breadth of topics is so large that even a practicing materials scientist will learn a lot from reading the book. There are discussions of inorganic and biological polymers, mineral films, magnetism, imaging, etc. Even better, especially for the average reader, is the constant referal to actual devices (both current technology and speculation about future technology). This is not an esoteric book - Ball includes issues such as solar power and its feasibility (it's still more expensive to generate solar lectricity than oil-fired or hydro). There is also extensive discussions on such diverse issues as wear in machines, the operation of computer magnetic hard drives, and medical prosthetic devices such as artificial hearts.

This is not a quick read - there is some technical jargon and the text is quite dense. However, there are many diagrams and the writing is quite accessible, so I would not hesitate to recommend this book as a wide-reaching and honest overview of the broadly amorphous field called materials science.