You know that we are living / in a material world / and I am a material girl. When you’re working on a magazine that is all about materials, sooner or later this 80s classic will get stuck in your head.

Boomer-alert here, but for weeks I have been thinking about the accompanying iconic (and ironic) video with Madonna in her pink dress, surrounded by handsome, but quite gullible men who all try to gain (or rather, buy) the leading lady’s favor by showering her with glitzy costume jewelry. The message was very much suited to the decade. The only thing that matters is material wealth, and that wealth is literally in the materials.

Fast forward 40 years to the present, and we know that the first part of that statement may be disputed, but the latter part still holds. The material world, in whatever form, is not only the major driver of wealth; it simply constitutes everything around us, including ourselves.

Life, everything we make and use, planet Earth, our galaxy and the rest of the universe – materials are, or more scientifically put: matter is everywhere and everything. And yet, we often seem oblivious to all this material wealth.

Maybe it is exactly because of this overwhelming ubiquity that we take materials for granted. They plainly exist. Which is of course true for plenty of naturally occurring materials. Sand, rocks, minerals, ores, clay, salt, but also air and water – even though these last two may not be considered ‘materials’ by most people, they definitely are ‘matter’ – simply exist. As is almost the entire Periodic Table.

’There are still so many materials that we haven’t created, designed or even imagined yet’ 

Moving to the living world, the number of materials quickly becomes massive. And, last but not least, there is of course the realm of synthetic materials. The size of the chemical space is absolutely mind-blowing. There are still so many materials that we haven’t created, designed or even imagined yet.

Who can blame the scientists at ICMS for dedicating their time, energy and creativity to exploring that space. And they do not even seem daunted by the challenge.

On the contrary, they relish the idea of probing deeper and deeper into the basic foundations of what makes a material behave the way it does and the other way around — translating the desired properties back to the requirements on the molecular scale. They hop from molecule to material to device and just as easily turn back again.

The ‘cold hard cash’ that Madonna was after is not what drives this crew. They are in it for the mind game and want to follow their curiosity, crack complex puzzles, and engineer stuff that works. Only by putting our mind to the test can we truly appreciate the astounding wealth of the material world.