Told my son it was an easy class. It was when I took it 35 years ago. Then it was about metals.. alloys, annealing, heat treating, and the basics of ceramics, not much more.

Now? It’s like 3 or 4 classes rolled into one. Their content about metals is indecipherable 9fro example now including the consequences of different types of defects at an atomic level in different types of crystal structures having effects on a whole range of material properties). I took 3 separate classes in polymers as a specialty, but that is now a significant portion of the materials class. I enjoyed fracture mechanics as a separate class, and that’s now part of this same class.

But that chart you posted is very cool and there’s a materials book that is chock full of them. They didn’t have ANYTHING like that in the 80s.

Physics seems pretty similar except that in the 80s we learned that light acted like a wave and a stream of particles, but now they have the kids calculating how 3-d oscillations of electrons (which can result from movements of electron-nucleus bonds, electron-electron interactions between atoms, or as a result of incident radiation) generate radiative electrical AND magnetic fields that actually is a wave of light… seems to me they’ve figured out how to explain it and stuffed it into sophomore physics. Now they also have to do video presentations instead of written lab reports (that’s pretty cool) and they have to learn some prorgramming.

...Engineering.

He came to me in high school and told me that's what he wanted to be, a Materials Scientist, because it would combine physics, chemistry and math. I had only a vague understanding of it as an independent discipline. (I'm a chemist; mostly focused on bioorganic chemistry.)

I have a far greater appreciation of Materials Science now.

From what I can tell, Materials Science Engineering programs are still very small at most Universities, which is a good thing for students in the discipline, but they need to be far bigger to get humanity through the crisis in which it finds itself, particularly with respect to the environment.

Trust me, if you go beyond electrons and their orbitals, and add neutrons and recoiling nuclei to the equation, the discipline is very profound. One can, I'm sure, spend a lifetime and not scratch the surface.

I'll be giving a lecture this month that basically is about the complex metallurgy of actinide metals (where f orbitals play a role in bonding). It's not my specialty by any stretch of the imagination, but in putting the lecture together, I've developed a far deeper understanding of what my son is working through. I hope he enjoys and approves of the lecture.