Chemistry
Materials Project
For this project, we were assigned the task of writing something major and of importance about a new innovation in material chemistry, or to write a letter with suggestions for improvements to a company, or to write about the history of these materials. Despite the wide array of ideas prancing about my head, I decided to write an article about improvements that could be made in a specific area. This article, although not in it's final state at time of writing due to my goal of getting it published online, is a piece of work that fascinated me, and has captivated my imagination. I hope the same happens for you.
The chemistry of materials has had a profound impact on us. It has given us alloys to lighten our cars and skis, and it has given us composites to make our plastics stronger. With our understanding of the chemistry of materials, we can take the bonds that hold together the very basic structure of everything, and forge the future. Propagandist speechifying aside, it really is remarkably useful to take, say, carbon, and be able to use its properties and capabilities to create incredibly strong materials like nanotubes, even if they are only on the scale of a billionth of a meter. And with improvements, these discoveries can be scaled up to benefit us directly.
Now, why do, say, carbon nanotubes possess this strength? The individual carbon atom is, although too tiny to see or interact with, possessed of a few boring-sounding properties, such as the amount of energy needed to take an electron from it. However, this amount of energy helps decide what else can bond with it, which leads to larger structures of atoms, and the introduction of properties such as heat-resistance, and tensile strength. Can these bonds be broken apart by things? How do these molecules interact in different temperatures? This decides whether what you can interact with is a solid, a liquid, or a gas. And that, I think, is what makes the chemistry of materials so fascinating. You can explore and understand what makes up everything.
Another aspect of this was the Shark Tank project, in which I tried to sell the above paper, or at least the concept therein, to the general public. My beautiful pitch is below.