The Materials That Did Not Exist: Inventions and Discoveries

The meeting “The Materials That Did Not Exist: Inventions and Discoveries,” held in the Conai A4 Room, was moderated by Francesco Mambretti, Post Doc in Atomic Simulations at the Italian Institute of Technology. On stage, Professor Marco Beghi of the Polytechnic University of Milan and Professor Silvia Gross of the University of Padua guided the audience on a fascinating journey, from the atomic scale to the major geopolitical challenges of our time.

“A discovery concerns a new phenomenon, typically unexpected, something nobody was looking for because nobody imagined it existed,” explained Marco Beghi. The quintessential example is superconductivity, first observed by Kamerlingh Onnes while studying the behavior of metals at extremely low temperatures, made possible by his ability to liquefy helium. A pure discovery, therefore, which paved the way for countless inventions.

An invention, on the other hand, is “the outcome tenaciously pursued for decades,” as in the case of the sensitive glass used in our smartphones. An idea born with the first computer graphical interfaces that required decades of targeted efforts and substantial investment to become reality.

Beghi emphasized that the success of a material does not depend solely on its intrinsic properties, but also on the technologies that enable its production and use. Steel, an alloy of iron and carbon, was the building block of the Industrial Revolution. Likewise, silicon maintained its dominance over gallium arsenide, potentially faster, not because of its absolute qualities, but because the technology to produce perfect silicon crystals on a large scale was far more advanced. This drove increasing miniaturization, leading to today’s chips with up to 100 million transistors per square millimeter, making devices incredibly fast.

The professor then concluded his talk by showing the complexity of a modern superconducting wire: to make it stable and functional, hundreds of microscopic niobium tubes filled with tin are assembled into a wire less than a millimeter in diameter. “Superconductivity is a discovery,” remarked Beghi, “but to make a wire like this, it is clear that this is all invention and technology.”

While Beghi focused on the creation of new materials, Professor Silvia Gross reversed the perspective, starting from “materials that already existed, but are becoming scarce or, in technical terms, critical, and therefore must be recovered.”

The ecological and digital transition, Gross explained, is actually a “transition of materials.” An energy system based on renewables is far more intensive in terms of metal usage than a traditional one. Just think that an electric car contains a significantly higher amount of critical raw materials, such as metals for batteries and magnets, compared to a combustion engine car.

The European Union, aware of its dependence on countries like China that hold a monopoly on many of these elements (the so-called “rare earths”), has drawn up a list of raw materials defined as “critical.” Criticality is determined by two factors: their strategic importance for European technologies and the high risk of supply disruptions, including those caused by geopolitical tensions.

The solution, according to Professor Gross, lies in the circular economy and the exploitation of “urban mines”: our electronic waste. “The concentration of metals in a ton of mobile phones is 100 times higher than what can be found in mined rock,” she stated, highlighting the enormous potential, also economic, of recycling. Extracting metals from waste also requires much less energy and produces less wastewater than traditional mining.

The technological challenge is immense: a mobile phone contains between 30 and 40 different elements, and separating them selectively is a complex process. Here the creativity of chemistry comes into play, with the development of new “smart” molecules capable of selectively “capturing” a single metal, or the use of innovative and more sustainable solvents to extract lithium and cobalt from spent batteries.

The meeting concluded with a strong call for responsibility and intelligence, as emphasized by moderator Francesco Mambretti, encouraging a non-ideological approach to the issue of recovery. He invited attendees to continue the dialogue by visiting the exhibition “Homo Faber,” curated by the Euresis association, to experience firsthand how humans can understand and manipulate matter to build a more sustainable future.