DEVELOPING AND DESIGNING NEW CHEMICALS AND MATERIALS - Chemistry: Notable Research and Discoveries - page 20

composites. But progress has been slow and time consuming. Th e next
stage in materials science, at the frontier of this branch of research, is to
investigate the possibility of designing the optimal material in advance.
Designing materials rather than relying on trial and error would be
much faster and more effi cient. Imagine a team of construction workers
trying to raise a skyscraper without benefi t of a blueprint or architect—
one mistake and the whole thing tips over. Developing new materials
without a plan can be just as frustrating.
Th ere are two main design methodologies that researchers are cur-
rently pursuing. Both have advantages and disadvantages. One method,
QuantumMechanics
The British physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton
formulated his laws of motion in the 17th century. These
laws predict the course of an object when subjected to vari-
ous forces, such as a push, pull, or a collision with another
object. In Newtonian physics, physicists can predict the mo-
tion of an object with any desired degree of accuracy if all the
forces acting on it are precisely known.
In the 20th century, physicists discovered to their sur-
prise that small particles such as atoms and the compo-
nents of atoms do not obey Newton's law of motion. Instead
of being deterministic—following trajectories determined by
the laws of physics—tiny bits of matter behave probabilisti-
cally, meaning that their state or trajectory is not precisely
determined but can follow one of a number of different op-
tions. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg proposed
his uncertainty principle in 1927, which states that there is
generally some amount of uncertainty in measurements of a
particle's state.
Also in the 1920s, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schröding-
er developed an equation that describes the motion of small
particles. This equation, which continues to be used today,