It's Still a Material World
H&G6-10-Tue3
Rick Gander
This course will take place in person at 60 Turner Street. The room will be equipped with a HEPA air purifier.
March 11 - May 20 (No Class April 15)
From today’s news it can feel like we live in a world that revolves around AI and social media, but in reality, "actual things" like food, shelter, transportation, and energy are what makes life sustainable. "Actual things" are based on minerals and raw materials that come from the earth. While the list of these materials is long, including hundreds of metal ores and non-metal minerals, this course will focus on five of the most important raw materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, and lithium, the products made from them and how they impact our lives. In the 21st century we take more of these materials out of the earth each year, than mankind did from the time of the Stone Age to the dawn of the Space Age.
In our class we will explore each substance’s nature, characteristics and sources. We will focus on the uses, technology of production and transformation to major usable products made from these materials that have important impacts on our lives, e.g. end products of steel, electrical components, fiber optic cables, batteries. We will understand the history of the discovery of these substances, the exploitation, economic and social impacts, and consider what the future may hold for these essential resources and their products.
Roughly the same amount of lecture and discussion
Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway: Alfred A. Knopf publisher. ISBN (hardcover) 9780593534342
Powerpoint-type presentations including videos will be provided by the SGL.
Approximately 40 pages of reading weekly
Rick Gander studied economics, politics, and metallurgy at MIT and business at Wharton. He worked in technical and commercial positions in the steel industry, then as a consultant in steel, metals and mining at Arthur D. Little in Cambridge and Hatch Associates in Mississauga, Ontario. He has visited and worked at numerous ore mines, steel mills, metal fabricating and durable goods manufacturing factories in the US, Canada, Russia, Japan, and several developing nations, including Indonesia and Venezuela where he consulted on development projects at the national steel plants.