So far in this book we have been operating in the realm of science: physics toward understanding the atom and developing the roots of chemistry. Now we enter the realm of application and invention: applied physics, chemistry and materials science, engineering, and metallurgy.

In this Part Five, I mention or describe some of the many materials and devices devised with the help of our knowledge of quantum mechanics (or simply understood after invention through our knowledge of quantum mechanics). I mainly address the more physics-based inventions, but I also include in Chapter 22 examples of recent developments using new forms of carbon in composite materials. These follow from the discussion of carbon and its compounds in Chapter 15. We consider nanotubes, carbon-fiber composites, and one “dream” application that utilizes these materials for flight.

While materials have been developed and used in many ways since ancient times and much invention has occurred even without complete understanding, further invention has often been spurred by both modern classical concepts and quantum mechanics. Indeed, as noted in the preface to this book, fully one third of the US economy involves products based on quantum mechanics.¹ In the applications of modern chemistry and biology we have a host of plastics, polymers, coatings, paints, cosmetics, and medicines too numerous to mention. But the influence of quantum mechanics has been most directly felt in areas of the physics of materials and electronics, and it is in these more physically based areas that we concentrate here. As background to this discussion I described in Chapters 16 and 17 the makeup of solids and their electrical properties.

One fascinating optical quantum device with a multitude of applications, the laser, was presented in Chapter 4. We will discuss its application in fusion power generation in Chapter 20. This device and most of the rest of the modern wonders that we will consider are in some way electrical and involve the conduction of electricity through metals or the alloys of metals. In Chapter 19 we discuss superconductivity, a fantastic quantum mechanism for electrical conduction that has been used to achieve something akin to perpetual motion (without most of us knowing about it, in a modern device that we have used extensively).

Superconducting devices usually operate to either detect very small or weak magnetic fields or create very large and intense ones. One application under development that uses large-volume high magnetic fields is the superconducting maglev train, shown in Figure 19.1. (I describe more of this development in Chapter 19.) In Chapter 21, I discuss magnetism, modern magnetic materials and their applications, and what is meant by a “high” magnetic field, a field so strong that it can levitate a frog.

Most of us are familiar with modern inventions in electronics, and most of these inventions involve semiconductors. But few of us have the faintest clue as to how these electronic devices operate, or how one manages to place billions of electronic circuit elements on a chip the size of a small postage stamp (so that, for example, computers can store and rapidly process enormous amounts of information). In Chapter 23, I discuss how this is done.

In Chapter 24, we return to superconductivity to consider large-scale applications of superconductors; for example, in the search for the Higgs boson and in efforts underway to develop new sources of electric power and to improve the operational features and efficiencies of components for power generation and transmission on a scale to light even the largest of our cities. It is in this field of superconductors and superconducting devices that I have contributed over a span of some forty years as inventor, physicist, materials scientist, metallurgist, engineer, and project manager; and I describe here some of the inventions and developments that are part of my own experience.

Note, in many of the chapters that follow, we will often be examining what has broadly been referred to as “nanotechnology,” innovations that work with entities on the scale of the nanometer (one billionth of a meter), perhaps ten to a hundred times the size of atoms. I mention just two recent innovations here that fit that category but do not conveniently fit into the subject matter of those chapters. These are innovations that affect the strength and weight of solids.

In her article in MIT Technology Review of March/April 2015, Katherine Bourzac describes the groundbreaking work of Julia Greer at California Institute of Technology. Among her other accomplishments, Greer has created:

a ceramic that is one of the strongest and lightest substances ever made. It's also not brittle. In a video Greer made, a cube of the material shudders a bit as a lab apparatus presses down hard on it, then [the cube] collapses. When the pressure is removed, it rises back up “like a wounded soldier.”2

Julie Shapiro, in Time magazine of November 2015, describes in a page labeled “Breakthrough: ‘A Metal That's (Almost) Lighter Than Air’”:

The world's lightest metal contains hardly any metal at all—in fact, it is made of 99.99% air. Called a microlattice, the material is a three-dimensional grid of tiny tubes that is up to 100 times as light as Styrofoam. And it is poised to revolutionize the way we fly.³

I welcome you to the wonders of Part Five.