Throughout the ages of humankind, materials have been the overwhelmingly crucial determinant of the competitiveness of individuals and societies. Today, a better understanding of the atomic and molecular structure of materials is becoming indispensable for the development of new materials, and the improvement of existing materials. As a result, materials are being tailored to meet specifi c applications to address pressing industrial and societal challenges in the highly competitive contemporary world. In this process, ceramics technology plays a particularly important role, and hence has emerged as a driver of technological progress in many industrial sectors.
It is a widely accepted paradigm that such technological progress takes place in a highly competitive environment where only a limited amount of the required resources exist. Hunger for raw materials has always been a strong driving force in world history. Throughout the history of humankind, the information contained within each newly developed or signifi cantly improved material or technology has increased exponentially. Figure 1.1 suggests that the knowledge required to make pottery -that is, the mining/collecting, processing, forming, and fi ring of clay, including the knowledge and skill to construct and operate kilns and fl ues -were orders of magnitude higher than those needed to fashion rather simple tools and implements from bone or stone. The quantifi cation of the " technology information content, " plotted logarithmically on the ordinate of Figure 1.1 , is -of course -highly subjective. Nevertheless, it suggests that the knowledge acquired in pottery making has later been put to use to mine, dress, and smelt ore, and to purify and alloy metals. As is evident from the fi gure, technological development stagnated in the Western societies during the Dark and Middle ages, but eventually took off dramatically during the Renaissance and the emerging Age of Science. Since the rate of change in materials technology is everaccelerating, the increase in information content -that is, entropy -leads to an ever -decreasing technological half -life of newly invented materials and technologies. The consequences of this effect have been estimated and projected onto future economical and societal trends of developed and developing nations 1 1