You are about to embark on the study of what I think is the most exciting and impactful areas of Engineering - that is Materials Science and Engineering.   Throughout the ages and including today, whoever controls Materials technologies dominates the World.  Human epochs are defined by the dominant materials technology.  The Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and now the Silicon Age represent the critical technologies, sadly for weaponry, but also for the technologies that have allowed the human race to improve their everyday existence on Earth.  The Iron Age led to the industrial revolution which gave rise to steel ships, trains, and automobiles.  It led to stronger and taller buildings, vastly improved agriculture and water systems.  You know the rest.  Today the world is controlled by computers.  The materials science and engineering behind the purification of Silicon is one of the most amazing examples of human endeavor that has ever existed.  The critical breakthrough which allowed Si and Ge technology to become inexpensive was the Zone Refining technique developed by a materials scientist, Bill Pfann at Bell laboratories in the early 50s.  Now we have computers in everything and our capabilities, as well as vulnerabilities, have never been so amazing.  Right now, no one knows what the next material age will be.  Some think it may be the Carbon Age with the advent of Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene, and the explosion of bio materials.  Others think it will be the Nano Age, or even the quantum age with exciting development of quantum computing (all materials science).  Perhaps you will be the one who launches us into the next epoch of human endeavor.At the heart of anything that is manufactured or prototyped are the materials that it is made of.  The material limits the performance of any device.  The material dictates the modes of failure, the operational conditions that can be tolerated (temperature, stress, environment, performance, etc.).  It is no coincidence that in our College of Engineering, with 13 departments and more than 16 degree programs, the only department that does not have a “Materials Group” (forgetting computer science and IOE) is the Materials Science and Engineering Department.  Yet, even computer science and IOE depend critically on materials and have a huge impact on materials engineering.  This term you will learn the fundamental concepts that dictate the properties and performance of materials.  Specifically, you will learn how structure and processing dictate radically different properties and performance of the same chemical composition of a material.  At the heart of materials science is the thermodynamic description of different solid phases of the same composition via phase diagrams.  These are similar to what you are familiar with from high school, pressure and temperature.  We are going to add something to this - the coexistence of multiple elements (two at first) or molecules.  We will extend the concept of the phase diagram and hold pressure constant and plot temperature against composition.  We will also study crystal structure, defects (Materials are kind of like people, the defects are what make them so interesting), and mass transport.  Materials science and engineering can be thought of as controlling defects and microstructure to create materials with properties that have never existed before.  In the past, materials were thought of as being metals, ceramics, polymers, and “functional” materials.  Now we realize that these old stereotypes are actually limiting.  Ceramics can exhibit superconductivity and polymers can have higher strengths than metals.  Glasses can be rolled on spools and metals can be made to be optically transparent on the nanoscale.  So please leave some of your everyday experience with materials behind.  Expect to be amazed and awed.  This course will try to give you a modern understanding of how Materials Scientists and Engineers view materials.  It is our hope that your creativity and innovation will let you take materials to a new level.We will use the concepts you have learned in chemistry and physics to understand, control, and exploit new materials properties.  We will also spend a great deal of time understanding how materials fail, corrode, fatigue, age, and interact with their environments so that we can understand how to think about materials from a design perspective. All this, and taught in a team and project based way, without using lecture as the first introduction of the material, without formal exams, and no graded homework!!