A neurosurgeon, who is about to retire, approaches a historian of science and says: “I’m thinking of taking up history of surgery; can you give me any tips?”

“Yes I can!” replies the historian. “As it happens, I’m also retiring and I plan to take up brain surgery; do you have any pointers for me?”

This caustic and surely apocryphal story is beloved by historians, for it highlights and mocks a perceived asymmetry between professions. Science and medicine are regarded as much more difficult, and to require much more specialized training, than history, which seems to be within the skill set of amateurs.

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A dramatic illustration of what’s wrong with that perception can be found in a project I’m currently working on – editing a book on the history of materials-science institutions across the world as part of a four-volume series on the history of materials science. It sounds easy in principle. Just compile a list of the laboratories that focus on materials science, describe how they evolved and say what they discovered.

But labs do materials science in different ways. National laboratories tend to be mission-driven and respond to government priorities. Metrological laboratories have (until recently) focused on making standards and testing materials. Industrial labs are product-driven and can target single materials (such as Corning) or a range of them (like IBM). Military labs, meanwhile, study defence-related materials and devices.

Science and medicine are regarded as much more difficult, and to require much more specialized training, than history

A history of institutions has to describe and evaluate this diversity. What’s more, materials-science labs depend on a network of funding agencies, professional societies, educational institutions and journals geared to the field.

Diverse discipline

In the US, which is only one of the regions that I have to cover, a variety of federal agencies sponsor such research. One of the most successful is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which the Economist recently said had “shaped the modern world”. In the 1960s, DARPA’s predecessor agency, ARPA, set up materials-science research centres at several universities to sharpen US prowess in key military areas during a heightening of the Cold War, each of which went on to become key parts of the materials-science network in their own right.

So much for the labs themselves. My volume on the history of materials science also needs to record how universities train material scientists. In the US, those institutions fall into two camps: prestigious places such as Berkeley and Cornell that focus on high-quality work and those that turn out lots of students. Then somehow I have to acknowledge different educational models. At universities like Northwestern, materials science is in a single department, whereas at the University of Texas, Austin, say, it’s interdisciplinary and spread across departments.

Then there are institutions that train, supervise, co-ordinate and regulate the community. So I must examine the work of specialized organizations such as the American Ceramic Society, the Society for Biomaterials, the polymer-physics division of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Crystallographic Association – as well as broader outfits like the Materials Research Society, the European Materials Research Society and even the International Union of Materials Research Societies.

And what about institutions that publish and disseminate research? There are learned-society publishers like the APS and the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World, as well as commercial companies such as Elsevier. Then there are magazines from the likes of the MRS and repositories like arXiv. I also have to identify which institutions have done key work on the real-world applications of materials. Can they be processed? Are they too expensive? Will they pollute?

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It’s clear that an entire network of institutions is required to make materials science happen, and there are different networks in different nations and regions. Each needs to be flexibly and efficiently managed for the research to happen. These networks evolve, with new ones entering and existing ones changing focus or disappearing.

New networks spring up in areas such as nanotechnology. There has also been a blurring between “hard” and “soft” materials, and the arrival of 2D materials, quantum materials and other exotic forms of matter.

How did there come to be “materials science” in the first place?

Finally, how did there come to be “materials science” in the first place? Until recently, materials such as ceramics, glasses, semiconductors and metals were studied separately using different instruments and theories. Only in the past few decades did those fields draw together into a single, coherent fields of science such as solid-state physics and condensed-matter physics.

That, in turn, raises the philosophical question of how and why this disciplinary consolidation occurred.

The critical point

Let me conclude with a story that Ian McEwan tells in his best-selling 2010 novel, Solar. The protagonist, a male physicist, is attracted to a woman who he knows is interested in the 17th-century poet John Milton. Keen to impress her, he spends a week reading books and biographies, memorizing passages and facts. The ploy succeeds – leading the physicist to conclude that English literature is easy and an academic scam compared to physics, which takes years to become skilled in.

The physicist gleefully points out his belief to an English professor. She, however, puts him firmly in his place, wryly remarking that of course he deserves a degree in English literature – provided he approaches 90 different women in the same fashion (which would involve studying one poet a week for three academic years) while at the same time crafting an aesthetic overview of all those poets’ works.

And that is why I wouldn’t recommend working on a history of materials science institutions to a neurosurgeon.

• The 2021 Physics World Materials Briefing is available in the Physics World app and digital magazine