What is something metallurgy and material science engineers know that others don't?
1) That metallurgy can be used to address crime scenes. Following example comes from a metallurgical handbook. There was car accident somewhere which occurred when a car moving in reverse went on to hit another car, damaging the other car and breaking its own tail light. The person driving the car claimed that it was not his mistake. The person who was in the car that got hit claimed that the car while moving in reverse did not have the reverse light on and hence he could not act leading to the accident. The police was in a fix when Metallurgy came to rescue :D . Here's howThere is certain thing called DBTT for materials. It means Ductile to brittle transformation temperature. A material failing/fracturing above this temperature would undergo a ductile failure which looks something like this Due to the ductile nature of material, there is neck which gets formed before the material fails. Below this temperature , the material is brittle and hence failure looks something like this But how does it relate to this case? The filament material in the car light has DBTT above 100 C which means that if the light were on it would have undergone ductile failure while if the light was off, a brittle fracture would have occured. The officers were hence able to resolve the case. 2)This is about the most versatile alloy, steel. Usually alloys are made by adding another metal to a base metal. Steel is one made by removing carbon from pig iron (iron obtained from blast furnace). So you may steel (say 0.15% Carbon) is purer iron than pig iron (4-4.5% Carbon).