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I brought some materials with me, I'm going to show you,
which may or may not be the future.
We'll see.
The brick.
We're not done yet with the brick, you'll be glad to know.
Some of you might.
Let me just--
OK.
Put that there for a minute.
OK.
Hopefully this is going to work.
Thanks very much for inviting me to speak on materials.
And with the setting of the future, it's something very
close to my heart.
And I'm going to start off with a view of the future from
the 1950s in the form of a film.
And just to sort of set the scene, I mean clearly the
stuff I'm talking about is everything, everything that
we've made, I suppose.
This is the man-made world, clothes, podiums, the
polypropylene or polycarbonate seat that
you're sitting on now.
It's got a nice combination of elasticity and hardness.
It'll stand time for 20 years.
These walls, this dome, the lights, the filaments,
everything.
So we've made this incredible world.
And this is who we are.
I mean, part of being human is to make new materials, is to
remake our world.
And obviously, the ages of civilisation
are named after materials.
So you have the Stone Age, Copper Age, the Bronze Age,
Iron Age, and so on.
So this subject is something that always does bring a new
horizon in.
And in the 1950s, there was a film called The Man in the
White Suit.
Remember this.
I mean, those of you of a certain age would have gone to
the cinema to see this.
Those of you who haven't seen this film, it's really worth
looking up.
And the premise of the film is this.
You got a scientist, material scientist, who's working in
the textile industry in Manchester.
And he invents a new material.
And basically, you can't break this material.
So it's a fibre.
You can make a suit out of it.
It can't be broken, and it can't get dirty.
And he goes to the management of the textile organisation
that he's in and says, this is great.
This is going to completely revolutionise this industry.
People are only going to need a couple of suits, couple of
jumpers, pants, in their life because these things are going
to last forever, and they're never going to get dirty.
And their response is to try and close down this invention
as soon as possible, try and really put a foot on it.
And he's incredibly surprised.
Naive scientist.
So then he goes to the unions, and he says to the
unions, you know what?
All this work you do, it's going to be history.
Soon, my material, everyone's going to have a few suits, a
few pairs of trousers, a few pairs of pants, for the rest
of their life.
You won't need any of these textile mills.
And of course, they all want to kill him, basically.
So this is always the conundrum with new materials.
They come along, and they sweep away certain bits of the
status quo, let's say.
The economic status quo, the familiar in terms of what
you're used to wearing, and your life, and what we make
stuff out of.
And it urges in a new future, which is uncertain and is
often promoted as being much, much better.
But for who?
That's the big question.
And no new material comes without this baggage.
So although this is a 1950s film, if you watch it, you'll
see that the themes are exactly relevant today.
Virtually nothing's changed, Alec Guinness has got older,
but he's still pretty cool.
OK, so I want to now sort of use an example of the future
we're living in now and try and replay that situation.
First, I just want to say that, you know, I'm obviously
a big materials fan.
So I don't look at this landscape here, this urban
snapshot, and think, oh my god, what have
we done to the world?
I think, wow.
This is as exotic, as wonderful, as a jungle.
And we made it.
And it's got a fantastic range of materials.
In fact, you don't really have to spend very long pointing
them out, and you already realise that each one of those
was a revolution in its time.
Each one of those completely changed the way we lived,
change how we lived, and all of our customs, our industry,
our economy.
And here we are.
We live in this world that we created.
I could pick any one of those materials and rewind history
and see if we could somehow learn something from how we
got to where we are today.
And I was going to actually ask for an audience poll at
this point, but I'm not going to do that because I'm not
good enough for that.
OK, so I'm going to do it for you.
I'm going to pick glass because it seems innocuous and
kind of obvious.
So I'm just going to rewind history for you.
So glass, where did it come from?
The Egyptians got hold of glass early on.
So this is like 5,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago.
That is a pectoral of [INAUDIBLE]
Tutankhamun.
At the centre, that's not a diamond.
That's not a ruby.
That's not an emerald.
That's a piece of glass.
So for them, glass had this incredible symbolic
significance because they learned that they could turn
sand into this jewel-like material.
They couldn't do it very well.
They were unable to make actual physical
objects out of it.
But they could make tiny fragments of it in a kind of
decorative way.
And not just that, but when they went into the desert to
look for it, they found very pure parts of glass, which
were seemingly created in storms.
And although lightning can create glass in the desert,
it's called a fulgurite.
When the lightning bolt hits a sand bank, which is mostly
made of quartz, which is the ingredients of glass, it can
turn it into glass.
This isn't a fulgurite.
This is much older.
This is probably 26 million years old, and it's probably
the impact of some meteorite into the earth into a desert,
creating beautiful bits of glass,
which they then collected.
OK, fast forward to the Romans.
And the Romans were really the first ones to kind of realise
that, although it's decorative and looked beautiful and could
be jewel-like, you could actually make functional
objects out of it.
But it was very hard to get the engineering right.
And they discovered that when you heat it up, it formed this
globule-like liquid mass.
And if you were then confident enough, you could then put a
pipe into it and blow it.
So this is a blown glass goblet.
And they had enough strength, these things, where they could
create, for the first time, transparent vessels.
So before this, all vessels, whether they were for grain or
for liquid, were opaque.
So they were either made of clay ceramics, or they were
made from pewter, silver, gold, depending on
how rich you were.
Any one of those ways, you weren't going to
see what was in it.
Suddenly, the Romans come along, and you can see the
liquid inside it.
You can see the colour of the wine.
This totally changes what they think about wine.
It totally changes the kind of wine they make.
It totally changes how it tastes, because as we now
know, you do actually modify your experiences depending on
what you see.
So you've got them making glasses.
And by the way, they make windows for
the first time too.
So before this, windows don't exist, and basically, everyone
has kind of a windy time of it.
In fact, the word window means wind eye.
So these things are great.
As you fast forward, at least in the European sphere, people
get better and better at making the glass.
They get more elaborate at making the glass.
And they start to enamel it.
They can etch it with acids.
They can just really-- they become absolute experts.
That's it.
And you think, well, OK, fine.
I like a glass of wine.
Who cares?
This is not really going to change the world.
All right.
So I like buildings that don't let the wind and the rain in.
Well done, glass.
But how revolutionary is this material really?
Well, it changes the way that people worship.
Because before this, you can't really make a massive building
that is at all inspiring because it can only be lit by
candles or oil lamps.
And actually, you can't see the ceiling.
So it might as well not be there.
When you have glass, suddenly you can make these glass
cathedrals.
And these are unique to Europe because glass.
Like in the East, they didn't have glass until the 19th,
20th century.
So they went down a completely different route.
Then the people who can make the glass start realising they
can do a lens action.
So it actually can help you.
So I don't know how many of you have got problems with
your sight, but basically all of you by the age of 50 are
going to be long sighted to some extent or not.
And I was born shortsighted, so my whole world would have
been blurry from the start, and was
for lots of our ancestors.
And certainly, as they got older, they became unable to
read or to see properly.
So this changed old age.
It changed actually scholarship because then you
could read for longer, and the people who knew knowledge and
knew scholarship could maintain their relationship
with the books.
Once you've got a lens, someone has the idea of
putting two of them together.
You get a telescope.
And a telescope magnifies the heavens.
And for the first time, you can prove that it isn't the
earth that goes around the sun--
no, it is the earth.
That's right.
Just checking.
[LAUGHTER]
It's the afternoon.
It's not the sun that goes around the earth, but it's the
earth that goes around the sun.
And you can do measurements, and you could find moons on
Jupiter, and this is what Galileo did.
So this changes, again, everything.
In fact, you can't really have astronomy to any accuracy
without a telescope.
And it's kind of interesting to think what would happen if
we hadn't got this material.
And how did it make it into our lives?
Not because people thought, oh, I've seen some glass in
the desert.
I'll make a telescope.
It takes hundreds of years, thousands of years, actually,
to get to that point.
It needs a certain set of people who value the material
and are skilled the material who perhaps only liked it for
its aesthetic qualities before, but now it's become
into its own.
It starts to affect physics and science and invent some
new science, right?
And then of course the microscope.
Now biology becomes possible.
Invents the test tube.
Without this, chemistry essentially is impossible.
Go to any chemistry lab you like.
Full of glass.
Why?
It's the perfect material to do experiments.
You can see what happens.
You can see colour changes.
You can see when precipitants form.
And to this day, without glass, chemistry comes to a
shuddering halt.
So this one material has widespread impact, just
[INAUDIBLE].
And it's very hard, it would have been impossible, really,
to have thought that that was going to happen.
It doesn't just change the sciences.
It changes beer because as soon as glass becomes cheap
enough to mass produce for taverns, whereas before, and
still these days often, you'll see these tankards hanging up.
They're either made of pewter, or they're made of ceramic.
You go to the Oktoberfest, you'll see
lots and lots of them.
That's the history of drinking beer, is not to
see the drink itself.
And most beers were cloudy and dark and tasted fantastic.
This glass comes along, starts to be served in taverns.
People see how cloudy and murky their beer is.
They demand a more beautiful beer.
10 years later, lager is born in the same place, in Bohemia,
in Czechoslovakia.
And we are then having to drink stuff that we can see
through glass.
Of course, the irony is that most lager gets drunk out of
opaque vessels these days in the form of a can.
So the one attribute that it's actually
designed for is obscured.
Anyway.
Of course, what would modern cities be like, not just
without wind coming through the windows, but actually
changing the architecture itself by making huge sheets
of the stuff?
And the modern city's sort of unrecognisable.
It's a palace to glass.
It fetishises the glass window.
People even put it inside.
Go to any modern office development.
You can't have an office with a door that's opaque anymore.
It's impossible.
You try and ask those architects how-- oh,
you won't open that.
You want people to see you inside working.
No, we don't.
We're academics.
We want to be ferreting away and no one
know we're in there.
No, you're having a glass door.
Anyway.
It's just everywhere.
That's my pet peeve.
But still, the point is that this thing has effect, has
effect on how you work, where you work, on architecture, on
aesthetics, everything.
Even the moving pictures.
Of course, there's the lenses in the cameras, but special
effects become possible.
Jaws is glass fibre.
So it's a composite material.
Fibre is a glass in a resin.
So you have this amazing material that's the best of
both worlds.
You can make incredible models like Jaws very realistic, I
still think, if you watch it today.
And of course, once you have people mucking fibres of
glass, they realise that, actually light doesn't travel
in straight lines as you previously thought, but can go
around corners.
And that opens the door to lasers, turning your telephone
conversations into pulses, and all data is
now sent down glass.
So your fibre optic whizzy stuff you buy off BT or
whoever you buy it from, sky, that's all due to glass.
Without glass, you're not going to get fast broadband.
In fact, it won't exist without it.
And of course, optical computers are coming.
Optical computers are going to really, really transform the
speed of the computational devices.
They're not here yet, but already we've seen the effects
of glass on data.
And it still hasn't stopped.
What's incredible is that this is a piece of glass which
probably will affect all of your lives at some point in
the near future.
And it doesn't even look--
it's not even developed for its optical qualities now.
What makes a glass, it's an amorphous solid.
And that often makes it transparent.
But in this case, this is called bioglass.
And its claim to fame is that it's inert in your body.
So the body doesn't reject it.
In fact, the surfaces are chemically altered so that
when stem cells sit on it, they turn into bone cells.
So you've got a stem cell.
It comes up to this material.
It thinks, oh my god, I'd like to live here.
It's got the right shape for me.
This is actually what they think.
And then they turn into a bone cell.
And as they grow into bone, they eat their way through
this material, which is porous.
You can't really see it in this picture.
They eat into it, and they leave bone behind, which then
becomes your cheekbone or your hip bone.
So these are already in practise being used in modern
medicine today.
Metallic implants are likely not to be the thing of the
future because they're the wrong stiffness.
And actually, who wants an implant when you can have your
own bone back?
So wow, glass has really done a lot for us.
And I wanted to show you an amazing piece of glass that
really probably deserves, if any piece of glass deserves to
be in a Future Fest, this is it.
It's a material without really a use.
Oh yeah, there is is.
OK.
It has got use.
NASA used it, and architects try and use it.
NASA used it to collect space dust.
And this is a piece of glass, but it's also the lightest
solid around.
And it's called aerogel.
And it's weird because it doesn't seem to exist.
It's transparent, but it's 99.8% air.
So where it begins and the air ends is not clear.
And it's a foam of glass.
Again, it's one of these foams of glass.
And it's perfect for space exploration.
It's the best insulator on the planet.
It's used to collect dust in space because when dust hits
it, it hardly alters it in any way chemically or in terms of
heat treatments.
So it's used to collect space dust by NASA.
But it's also looking for a terrestrial use, and no one
can quite find one for it.
It's sort of too good.
It's too--
when people used it for fabric to insulate clothes, and they
took it to the Arctic, people were too hot for this stuff.
So it's kind of an amazing--
you'd like to predict what it's going to be for, but
you'll struggle.
So glass--
and I put up there some of the kind of things that we've kind
of created with class.
And the only thing I want you to take away from that strange
diagram is that all glass roughly looks the same.
And that's what's so mysterious about it, is that
it's transparent, but inside are all these different
structures.
So that line down there is just a way of
zooming into the material.
You go from 1,000 millimetres to 10 millimetres to 0.1 of a
millimetre.
And each time you go down one of those scales inside the
piece of glass, any piece of glass, you come across these
different structures.
And what our ancestors were doing, even though they didn't
have this language, is they were modifying different
structures to create different things.
So I was talking about transparency and colour.
Well, that's actually down at the atomic scale.
You have to muck about with the chemistry
and the quantum mechanics.
They didn't have those languages, but they
knew how to do it.
It's just incredible.
If you want to make enormous sheets of glass, which we now
live with and are both wonderful and annoying, it
turns out you have to deal with the
top bit, the strength.
The strength actually is in the quite large defects that
normally inhabit glass.
So the strength of glass is not determined by its atomic
structure at all, which is a big surprise.
But it's true.
It's determined by the largest flaw.
And actually making glass with hardly any flaws in it,
submicroscopic flaws, is what those big panes of
glass are all about.
And before, when you're making glass, you have to pour it
onto a flat surface--
I haven't got very much time--
and you had to--
of course, it would solidify onto that surface.
Now, whatever flaws are on that surface, and it doesn't
matter how flat that surface is, it's going to have flaws,
would then determine the strength of that glass.
So panes of glass were always small until recently.
So how do you get around it?
You have to pour it onto something that
is atomically smooth.
What's atomically smooth?
Liquid.
So we pour it onto liquid tin.
Enormous rivers of liquid tin the size of this room, much
bigger than this room.
Glass is poured onto it.
You could have a pane of glass the size of this room.
It's incredible [INAUDIBLE].
And it can have enough strength to support its own
weight because of this knowledge.
So this microscopic understanding of the world,
this is new.
And it has come about because of glass microscopes, and then
electron microscopes [INAUDIBLE].
So all of these materials are due an update
due to this new knowledge.
And that's really what I want to say about the future, which
is that the future actually is about what you can't see.
It's the understanding of what you can't see.
But then it comes into your life, into
these amazing materials.
They behave like magic, but actually, it's these
microstructural features that are what give it this power.
And I don't have much time to talk about it, but I want to
just give you an example.
So this, what if you wanted a building that changed colour?
Now, OK, you might want that just because you like
buildings that change colour.
I happen to think that I'd like to live in one.
Imagine the autumn.
It would change, and then in the winter it would get
darker, and then in the summer it would suddenly become
spring-like.
Wouldn't that be great?
Whole row of houses changing colour.
All right, I'd like it, anyway.
But it has an environmental effect too.
If your house goes white, it will reflect more heat.
So you need less cooling.
If your house goes dark, it will absorb more heat from the
sun, and it needs less warming.
So actually, you can do two things at once here.
And you can actually passively heat or cool your house
selectively by creating a shape, a color-changing brick
or concrete.
And here it is.
We made it in our lab.
And it's magic, really.
So this is the sun.
Then it just changes colour and goes white.
I mean, basically, it's going from light blue to white.
I know that doesn't sound very amazing.
What we're doing is we're manipulating these different
scales down here.
We're creating different structures inside the brick
that they respond to, not heat in this case, but sunlight or
whatever you want.
So what that opens up for us is a whole plethora of
opportunities.
So you can change buildings colour, or you can make them
self-healing.
So here is a piece of self-healing concrete.
And this works, amazingly enough.
So if you crack this concrete, it will restore 90% of its
strength itself by healing itself.
And the way it does it is, again, by basically taking
advantage of different scales.
So in this case, it's a microscopic bacteria that's
embedded inside the concrete, which could survive the
alkaline environment.
And they found these in these kind of weird sort of places
in the world which have these kind of bubbling places where
they thought nothing could ever live.
And actually, they find bacteria in there.
Anyway, it can also live in concrete.
But it's dormant until the humidity goes up above a
certain amount.
So if it's this cracked, it exposes the
bacteria to this humidity.
It wakes up.
It looks around for food, which has been cunningly put
there by the concrete makers in the form of starch.
It eats the starch and excretes calcite, a major
constituent of concrete.
So it eats its way out of the crack, at the same time
blocking it up with one of the major
constituents of concrete.
Pretty impressive, I think you'll find.
And it seems to me that there is no end to this.
I'm not going to keep going--
I've got a box [INAUDIBLE].
I've run out of time.
But what I want to say is this, that our power to change
the world has never been greater.
And I think, as the glass example shows, it's actually
virtually impossible to predict which are the bets
that are going to take you in which directions.
Like glass is a really good example.
I could have chosen loads of others.
So what takes us forward, then?
Why?
Why should we go down some routes?
Should we go down the self-healing concrete route?
Should we go down the thermochromic brick route?
These are questions that we have to resolve, but you'll
never be able to predict which one will be beneficial to
society or which one will have the most impact in science or
which one will have impact in economics or manufacturing.
You'll never, ever be able to predict it because the world
is just too complicated and wonderful.
And that really is kind of a good thing, I think.
But one thing is for sure.
The only prediction I think I will make is that the world is
going to get more complicated because it's going to have
more wonderful materials in it, which we're going to make.
And I'm looking forward to that.
Thank you for listening.
[APPLAUSE]