Editor, Encyclopedia of Condensed Matter Physics	September 2005
	"Our ability to understand and provide controls over material characteristics has impacted our lives in many arenas such as via semiconductors in computers, analytical equipment in the medical arena, etc. Materials have been and continue to be the cornerstone of technology advancement. Many technology limitations are due to limits set by the materials and advances in the materials frequently are the key to major advances today."

I understand that you retired as professor and Head of the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue University in 1999, after 40 years in higher education. You also received your B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue. What lead to your interest in Materials Engineering? Were you focused on materials early on?
Yes and no. I was a football recruit coming out of high school and I wanted to be an engineer. I looked at a lot of universities and went to Purdue to play football. I got injured during my second year, so I went to my fallback position and that was to be a faculty member.

What type of engineer did you want to be?
I really didn’t know. One of my older brothers was a civil engineer and my other brother had studied to be an architect. I knew I wanted to get into some science related topic.

What happened as you progressed at Purdue?
I met the Head of the School when I was a freshman and he fascinated me with the world of materials, and the many challenges and opportunities that existed.

Was he a mentor to you?
Yes, in part he was. He laid down the challenge that only the best students come into his school. I always went after challenges and I wanted to be in with the best. The materials field covers chemistry, physics, mathematics, and all of the things that fascinated me as a teenager. To me, it was ideal. I could go in many different directions, which I did throughout my life. I was never focused on any one material. I went from one kind to another. I was schizophrenic in my research.

What would you say was your most interesting direction?
Probably the most interesting thing that opened up for me was the early stages of the transition into thin film electronics and some of the compound semiconductor efforts. I was fascinated with crystallography, crystal structure and phase transformations and factors that influenced those. There were a lot of things that evolved in the early days of semiconductor electronics and thin film electronics, which ultimately led into my jumping into high temperature superconductivity in the late eighties.

Did one direction develop into another?
Materials research encompasses the broad areas of structure of materials, properties of materials, and processing to make materials. I was in the structural characterization part of the team. My research employed X-ray scattering and electron microscopy to look at the structure of a whole spectrum of materials at various length scales. This feature allowed me to work in metallic alloys, ceramic materials, semiconductor areas, etc. The structural part that fascinated me was in each one of these things. I could use my tools to address problems in all sorts of materials.

What is condensed matter physics in layman’s terms?
It’s the study of solid material, of all forms, at all stages. It’s looking at all things that are solid, rather than looking at liquids or gases. It transcends the whole spectrum, including biological-related materials these days.

What are some of the changes you witnessed in the practice of condensed matter physics?
The changes over the years were monumental. The advances in technology (characterizations tools) allowed us to look at materials at finer and finer scales. In the fifties we were looking at atomic or somewhat larger scales, or the characteristics of how atoms were arranged. Now we can get down to sub-atomic scales. We can manipulate how we work with materials, how we process and make materials –the whole area of nano-materials. The changes that emanated from the computer era for studying materials, to actually get in and to characterize large numbers of entities, is remarkable. The rate and amount of information that one may assimilate in a short time via computerized research projects has allowed research that was not possible just 50 years ago. Further, the advent of more reliable sensors with higher and higher resolution allows one today to study an expanded length scale in materials – from nano to macro. We can now model large scale systems and provide more control over processing. Our ability to understand and provide controls over material characteristics has impacted our lives in many arenas such as via semiconductors in computers, analytical equipment in the medical arena, etc. Materials have been and continue to be the cornerstone of technology advancement. Many technology limitations are due to limits set by the materials and advances in the materials frequently are the key to major advances today.

Was the technology improving so quickly that it was hard to keep up? Did you constantly have to change the way you were teaching your students?
Yes, science and technology has exploded over the years, to the point that no one person can ever understand an entire field of science. Thus, to be successful one needs to focus on a segment of the field such as a specific phenomena, physical behavior, characterization/analysis tool, etc. In teaching students the focus moved from the knowledge base to concepts and how to synthesize a problem.

Did that mean students needed to narrow their focus of study, instead of having a more broad knowledge?
No, it changed their focus. When I started out, people were expected to know all the steel alloys, zinc alloys, brasses, glasses, etc. You categorized by types of materials and the approach tended to give the impression that each type of material was independent of each other. Eventually we recognized that there were a lot of features and processes that were essentially the same across all materials. So we focused on what it meant to study the structure of a material, how the atoms are arranged at the atomic scale all the way up to a macro scale. That approach is independent of the type of material you are looking at. I think if you look over hundreds of years of science there has always been an explosion of knowledge base, and then they reach a point where someone provides a unifying understanding and brings it back together again. We constantly seem to be going through this type of cycle. I was not fundamentally interested in the knowledge base that a student acquired because anyone could go out and find the knowledge, that’s the facts. I was more interested in the thought process, how you look at a problem. Certainly in higher education, that is what we are trying to achieve. One has the resources today in the electronic world to gather the facts, so you don’t have to retain all of them, but what you need is to retain how you synthesize from those facts. The ability to formulate a problem is fundamental – that is to analyze a situation, develop a hypothesis, and design a project to find answers to your hypothesis.

I understand that you were one of the creators of the Career Resource Center which was established to extend the image of the Materials Science and Engineering field throughout the education system. What would you advise students to do if they were considering the field of materials science?
I would advise them, as I would for virtually any field, to find out what is involved in the field. Find somebody working in the field, talk to people and read about it. Get as much first-hand information as possible and find out if it interests you. I would tell students to evaluate themselves. If they are happy with their life at least 51% of the time, then they should probably keep doing it. If they get down to 50% or below, they should probably re-evaluate and think about what they want to do.

Why do most students enter your field?
If you look at the statistical surveys that come out of virtually every field, most students went into fields by a close connection to a family member who was working in the field, via a teacher that they were close to in high school or college, or they happen to have a summer job that exposed them to aspects of a field that they were interested in. It should be noted that a large fraction of the people working in science and engineering as a whole will not be working in the field in which they studied ten or twenty years down the line. My approach has been that if you have a solid science-related base in engineering materials, and if you understood some of the history and background and how it applies to society, you’ve got one of the broadest educations you can get.

You mentioned that you were schizophrenic in your research, but to me you appear very focused.
Some people would say that, and some people would say that I jumped all over the place. My research involved aluminum alloys, steels, semiconductors, thin film, ceramics, polymers, and superconductors. From the aspect of types of materials I jumped all over the place. But if you look more closely there was a focus across all of my research. The basic problem under study in all cases was some aspect of the structure of the material and I was applying similar tools, x-ray scattering and electron microscopy, to all of these problems. So in one sense it looks very erratic and in the other sense it’s very focused.

How did you come to be involved with the Encyclopedia of Condensed Matter Physics?
One of the people working for the publisher at the time had talked with me over prior years about books and all sorts of things that were needed in education in the world, and they happened to remember things I had said. I was asked to be involved because I have a broad background in the area and I know a lot of people.

How long of an effort has this been for you?
That’s a good question; it’s been at least three years. It went slowly starting up. In the last year and a half things became very focused. We had a few meetings of the mind as to where we were going and then it moved quite well.

I understand this work is divided into broad subject areas.
Yes, we picked out aspects of condensed matter physics that we felt are foundations to the field and to include many of the emerging aspects such as biophysics. The topics covered provide a valuable reference material for those working in the field who wish to know more about a topic outside their major area of expertise as well as providing an authoritative reference source for students and teachers throughout other areas of science and engineering. The focus audience is advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals in science and engineering, while also providing a forum for the educated layperson that has an interest in science.

What is special about this Encyclopedia?
We have a range of topics. The articles are essentially focused tutorials on specific topics that there may be a wealth of knowledge on but which is difficult to get because the literature is scattered here and there. The articles give you a knowledge base that you need in some areas and the background phenomena in other areas to allow you to understand and go further. The references will direct you to the actual literature where you can go deeper and find out more. This will be very useful in the educational world.

Why?
Textbooks get to a point where they aren’t really useful anymore. Each year that you teach a course you may modify it and include a different set of topics. The textbooks don’t always include what you may want to teach. With the Encyclopedia, you can look at a collection of articles, which makes a fantastic background for courses, particularly in graduate school. I’ve talked to some faculty members about the Encyclopedia, and they are overjoyed because they know the content of some of the articles, and they anticipate using some of them in their courses.

What are you doing now during your retirement and with the Encyclopedia about to publish? Do you plan to do more writing?
No, I have no plans for further writing, at least not in the science area. I believe that one should move onto other aspects of life when one retires just as one moved through various research areas in one’s professional life. I still lecture at a couple of places, but not much. My interests span a range of areas. I’ve been involved in genealogy for decades and continue to work on it. I’m also very involved in the gated community where I live via the architectural review and amenities committees. Also I am very active in the local rotary group and the local computer society. Computer technology played a major role in my professional life and I enjoy helping others make optimal use of it. I do web design and maintain four or five web sites. Further, I enjoy gardening and maintaining my small mountain site. Retirement keeps me busier than ever and I tell people that I need to take a vacation periodically from this retirement lifestyle. So I travel and enjoy places and people.

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This article by Jacqui Tavis
j.tavis@elsevier.com