Material Properties Quotes

The final result of our researches has widened the class of substances sensitive to light vibrations, until we can propound the fact of such sensitiveness being a general property of all matter.

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.

I would say the first three or four papers on nano-thermoelectricity in bismuth went almost unnoticed, but all of a sudden when Dirac cones came along - pop! - there was huge interest in bismuth-related materials.

The well-known fact that the form of a specific substance, e.g. water, and hence its properties can alter without a change in composition was disposed of by the formal view that a physical, not a chemical, process was involved.

I would say there are three important things about graphene. It's two-dimensional, which is the best possible number for studying fundamental physics. The second thing is the quality of graphene, which stems from its extremely strong carbon-carbon bonds. And finally, the system is also metallic.

The next time you see a spider web, please, pause and look a little closer. You'll be seeing one of the most high-performance materials known to man.

In the process of making nanomaterials, we learned that with the electronic density of states, the phonon electronic properties and everything change at the nano-level. So the thermoelectric properties would also be changed.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, hand-production methods were abundant. Craft defined everything. The craftsman had an almost phenomenological knowledge of materials and intuited how to vary their properties according to their structural and environmental characteristics.

It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.

You cannot expect stone to be as pliable as clay.

It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.

In the Marvel universe, vibranium has always been this material that absorbs kinetic energy. And any tiny bit of physics knowledge will tell you that that's really non-Newtonian. You can't just absorb energy, you've gotta change it into something else.

Whatever is not stone is light

The nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or coloured, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth.

The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.

I'm fascinated with materials, with processes, with technologies.

All that glitters may not be gold, but at least it contains free electrons.

The infinite variety in the properties of the solid materials we find in the world is really the expression of the infinite variety of the ways in which the atoms and molecules can be tied together, and of the strength of those ties.

I'm always interested in projects. Whatever I do, I'm interested in the color of the material. I'm not interested in who's making it. I'm more concentrated on the work.

You can't hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

The rigidity of a bottle's form does not affect the fluidity of the liquid it contains.

Understanding the materials I work with... gives me a deeper understanding of my place. And it's helped me make sense of the changes that are happening to me as I grow older.

Boron is carbon's neighbor on the periodic table, which means it can do a passable carbon impression and wriggle its way into the matrix of a diamond. But it has one fewer electron, so it can't quite form the same four perfect bonds.

I'm not so interested in the expression of something, but I'm more interested in what the material can do. And so that's why I keep exploring.

Superconductivity helped broaden my professional phase space. When I started my work, it was already known that magnetic fields could quench superconductivity. I found that the transition was not continuous, that superconductivity was initially enhanced in the presence of magnetic fields, then it would suddenly fall off.