“Visitors to the library will be encouraged to touch, sniff and even lick the materials” (Image: Charlie Bibby/FT)
Editorial: “Are we in the Metamaterial Age?“
See more in our gallery: “Know your stuff: Collect our pick of material wonders“
THE STRANGER’S muscles strained against his shirt as he hefted the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. “Wanna see what I’ve got?” he asked in a low Texan drawl, inviting the woman to follow him to a place where “no one would get hurt”.
To someone less worldly wise than Zoe Laughlin, this encounter at a conference in San Antonio might have seemed a little sinister. For her, though, it is all part of the job. Laughlin is one of a team at University College London’s Institute of Making that is building up “a wonder chamber that celebrates the material world”. The Materials Library, which is due to open this week, includes crying metals, a sponge for comet dust, living concrete – and the contents of a handcuffed Texan’s briefcase.
The idea started with Laughlin’s colleague Mark Miodownik. In the early 2000s he was just down the road at King’s College London, where he had a semi-famous office drawer. “People started visiting just to look at what was in the drawer, not to visit me,” he says.
Inside was an eclectic mix of materials he had collected. One was a wafer of aluminium nitride. Typically found inside electronic devices, this pale, smooth material performs a party trick beloved of materials scientists. Its thermal conductivity is unusually high, so …