Materials science is a multi disciplinary field involving the property of matter and its applications to various areas of science and engineering. It includes elements of applied physics and chemistry, as well as chemical, mechanical, civil and electrical engineering. With significant media attention to nanoscience and nanotechnology in the recent years, materials science has been propelled to the forefront at many universities, sometimes controversially. Many academics feel that the nano buzzword has been bringing in large amounts of funding at the cost of a shift in emphasis from fundamental materials science. Nanotechnology, they argue, puts too much emphasis on applications which may or may not see fruition as working products

Periods in history are often defined by the materials used by advanced civilizations of that era; the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Steel Age are examples. Materials science in a primitive form is one of the oldest forms of engineering and applied science. Modern materials science evolved directly from metallurgy, which itself evolved from mining. A major breakthrough in the understanding of materials occurred when Willard Gibbs, in the second half of the 19th century, showed how the thermodynamic properties relating to how atoms are arranged in various phases are in turn related to the physical properties of the material.

Modern materials science is a product of the space race; the understanding and engineering of the metallic alloys and other materials that went into the construction of space vehicles was one of the enablers of space exploration. Besides space exploration, materials science has been a driving factor in the development of revolutionary technologies such as plastics, semiconductors, and biomaterials. Until the 1960’s, many university departments which are now materials science departments were metallurgy departments. Since then the field has broadened to include every class of materials including metals, ceramics, polymers, electronic materials such as semiconductors, magnetic materials, and biological materials such as medical implants.

In materials science, rather than haphazardly looking for and discovering materials and exploiting their properties, one instead aims to understand materials fundamentally so that new materials can be invented and created with the desired properties. The basis of all materials science involves relating the desired properties and relative performance of a material in a certain application to the structure of the atoms and phases in that material through characterization. The major determinants of the structure of a material and thus of its properties are its constituent elements and the way in which it has been processed into its final form. These, taken together and related through the laws of thermodynamics, govern the material’s microstructure, and thus its properties.