Short answers, pulled from the story.
Materials science began to be widely recognized as a specific and distinct field of science and engineering in the 1940s. Major technical universities around the world created dedicated schools for its study during this period to move the field out of the shadows of its parent disciplines.
Josiah Willard Gibbs, an American scientist, demonstrated in the 1870s that thermodynamic properties related to atomic structure in various phases are directly linked to the physical properties of a material. This revelation transformed metallurgy and mineralogy from phenomenological observations into a rigorous science.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency catalyzed the growth of materials science in the United States in the early 1960s by funding a series of university-hosted laboratories. This funding was a direct response to the demands of the Space Race and marked the transition from viewing materials as a sub-field to recognizing it as a unified discipline.
The Hall-Petch relationship describes how grain boundaries affect the strength of a material within the microstructure scale. It explains that the presence of grain boundaries influences physical properties such as strength, toughness, ductility, hardness, and corrosion resistance.
An iron-carbon alloy is only considered steel if the carbon level is between 0.01% and 2.00% by weight. For steels, the hardness and tensile strength are related to the amount of carbon present, with increasing carbon levels leading to lower ductility and toughness.
The semiconductor industry had an estimated US$530 billion market in 2021. Silicon makes up the largest portion of semiconductors in use today, both by quantity and commercial value.