Keywords: materials science, Stone Age, Silicon Age, book of Genesis, Earth’s crust, God the

Creator.

1. Introduction

Materials – the first science! It is one of the oldest forms of engineering and applied
science, deriving from the manufacture of ceramics when our ancestors began to fire clay to
make pottery. The pottery represented the first synthesis of materials from minerals, [2] provided
a better means for storage and transport of food and water, thus helping in the struggle for
survival. That fact from the world of our ancestor shows us what the Bible says about a true and
sovereign God who instructs us to take responsibility concerning the care of His creation: God
blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.
Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on
the ground." (Genesis 1:28, NIV) This verse contains the word subdue, an expression that is
helpful in determining the mandate of stewardship. Thus we are not to exploit, waste or despoil
God’s creatures, but to care for them and use them in the service of God and man. Tragically,
because of sin, man abused his stewardship. We are now in a struggle that was not originally
intended. But the redeemed person, the person in Christ, is refashioned. He can now approach
culture with a clearer understanding of God's mandate. He can now begin again to exercise
proper stewardship. This is the foundation for any Christians as redeemed persons in Christ to
play a big part in shaping our world, particularly in the synthesis of high performance materials
which will be discussed later.

God wants us to use what He has put in the world. This can be seen from the
development of technology from the Stone-Age to the Silicon-Age that the development of
mankind has been described in terms of the materials used in fabricating tools and devices
(Figure 1-4). Whether it is a flint axe, a leather-skin drum, a telescope, a microelectronic circuit
or an artificial heart someone has considered what the properties should be of the material, then
they found a suitable material and engineered it to perform the required function.

Figure 1 Early Materials Science: Stone- Figure 2 One of the oldest finds: a beautiful
Age human-kind processes a tool. Mesolithic flint blade approximately 6,000 years
old. [3]

Figure 3 Integrated printed electronics. [4] Figure 4 CardioWest Total Artificial Heart. [5]

There are many ways to make useful things out of materials, some of which are quite specific to
a particular class of materials. They include rolling, extrusion, machining, grinding, forging,
forming, injection moulding, casting, sintering, deposition from liquids or vapours and many
others. Again, there are crucial links between the structure and properties of a material and the
methods one can use to make useful objects out of it, and vice versa. The aim of understanding
the links between the internal structure of the material, the final properties of the material, and
the processing of a material is to understand how and why the material fulfils its intended

1
purpose, or how its performance may be enhanced. Learning a material is like learning people.
The performance or function of the material is the driver for working on its structure, properties
and processing, and measuring its performance.

2. What is Materials Science?

Perhaps the simplest way to answer this question is to look at what materials scientists
[6]
do. First, they determine the structure of materials. Second, they measure properties of
materials. Third, they devise ways of processing materials, i.e. creating materials, transforming
existing materials, and making useful things out of them. Fourth, they think about how a material
is suited to the purpose it serves already, and how it may be enhanced to give better performance
for particular applications. Each of these four activities is intellectually challenging and there are
many materials scientists who are fully stretched not being engaged in more than one or two of
them. But what makes materials science especially interesting and rewarding is the fact that these
four activities are very dependent on each other. Indeed, this is what elevates the status of
materials science to a discipline in its own right, apart from but drawing on chemistry, physics,
engineering, biology, earth sciences and mathematics.

3. Materials We Use

Our ancestors learned long ago that the materials needed for food, clothing, dwellings,
fuel, and for commercial activities are not uniformly distributed over Earth. Figure 5 and 6 show
the locations of some of the major iron deposits in the world and the major world reserves of
aluminium, titanium, and manganese. This leads to the development of local, regional, national,
and international trade routes.

Figure 5 The locations of some of the major iron deposits in the world. The banded iron
formation (BIFs) constitute the world’s major producers today and are the major reserves that
will provide iron in the twenty-first century.[2]

2
Figure 6 The major world reserve of aluminium, titanium, and manganese. Also shown are the
largest producers of silicon and magnesium. [2]

The Earth’s natural resources are the raw materials from which directly or indirectly, all
products used in our society are made. Metals and ceramics used by men come from the minerals
God placed at the Earth’s crust. Mineral resources are nonrenewable resources of which the
Earth contains a fixed quantity and which are not replenished by natural processes operating in
short time scales. Metals which consist of chemical elements that either singly or in combination
have those special properties such as malleability, ductility, fusibility, high thermal conductivity,
and electrical conductivity that allow them to be used in a wide range of technical applications.
Metals have been the key materials through which humans have developed the remarkbly
diversified society we now enjoy and by which we have managed to proceed from the primitive
societies of antiquity to the present. It is not surprising that metal-winning and metal-working
skills of ancient communities have been used as a measure of societal development and hence
that terms such as Bronze Age and Iron Age have come into common parlance. The first metals
were utilised by humans before 15,000 BC – they were gold (Au) and copper (Cu) because these
are the two metals that most commonly occur in the metallic, or native, state. They found the
metal behaves differently from brittle rocks and our ancestor’s ability to shape the metals into
useful and desirable forms developed rapidly. By 4000 B.C. our ancestors had learned about
extractive metallurgy to gain copper from certain kinds of rocks (sulfide ores) using primitive
smelting techniques in which charcoal probably supplied the heat and also the means of
chemically reducing copper ores to free the copper metal. Within a thousand or so years, silver
(Ag), tin (Sn), lead (Pb), zinc (Zn), and other metals were also being extracted and ultimately
combined to form alloys such as brass (Cu and Zn), bronze (Cu and Sn), and pewter (Sn and
other metals such Pb, Cu, and Sb).
Iron, though much more abundant in Earth’s crust than most other metals, is more
difficult to extract and hence its use came somewhat later.[2] It is believed that the first iron

3
utilised came from meteorites. The strength and hardness of iron make it superior to copper and
broanze for weapons, and this led to the widespread use of iron.
Ceramic materials are complex chemical compounds and solutions containing both
metallic and nonmetallic elements. Alumina (Al2O3) for example, is a ceramic composed of
metallic (Al) and nonmetallic (O) atoms. Ceramic materials have a wide range of mechanical and
physical properties. Applications vary from pottery, brick, tile, cooking ware, and soil pipe to
glass, refractories, magnets, electrical devices, fibers, and abrasives. The tiles that protect the
space shuttle are silica, a ceramic material. The cement and concrete are ceramic materials used
for highways and other construction purposes which are manufactured in greater volume than
any other product.
Ceramics are usually hard, brittle, high-melting-point materials with low electrical and
thermal conductivity, good chemical and thermal stability, and high compressive strength.
However, ceramics are somewhat an enigma. Although, they are, indeed, brittle, some ceramic
matrix composites (such as Si3N4-SiC) obtain fracture toughness values greater than some metals
(such as age-hardened Al alloys) and some are even superplastic. [7] Although most ceramics are
good electrical and thermal insulators, SiC and AlN have thermal conductivities near that of
metals! All the explanations above show that the Perfect God with His Marvellous Thoughts has
created and provided the materials for us to do experiments to come up with ideas in creating
high performance materials for transforming the way we do things.

Tens of thousands of materials are now available for various engineering purposes, and
new ones are constantly being created. We have long identified epochs of human history in terms
of the materials exploited – referring for example, to the given era of Stone-Age or the Iron-Age.
The hallmark of progress in every era has been the way ‘materials engineers’ worked to improve
the usefulness of materials, whether extracting coal or iron ore from the earth or creating new
materials from combinations, such as iron and carbon to produce steel. For most of history such
improvements have been incremental and have depended on experimentation, accidents, and
passing on from generation to generation the ‘art of materials processing and finishing. Currently
the insights into materials are at the atomic and molecular level – the science of nanotechnology
– the understanding of materials at the nanometer and molecular size – is now building on these