Chapter 1.1: Institutions and Technology in Materials Research

The relation between the material or physical world and the immaterial one is an old philosophical problem engaging thinkers such as Descartes, who in the 17th century claimed that the essence of matter was its spatial extension. After Newton had formulated his laws of gravitation and motion a few decades later, material ontologies started to gain popularity, the perhaps most common exponent of this shift being the watchmaker analogy for God. Since then, a number of social and cultural processes, mechanization, secularization and industrialization have contributed to a slowly growing obsession with material phenomena. Madonna has become mainstream when she claims “that we are living in a material world…”