Mark Miodownik is mulling over his next expedition. He wants to travel to a remote village in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina to recover a meteorite that smashed through the roof of a farmhouse there, but negotiations have not been easy: it is the fifth time in six months that the farmer’s home has been hit by meteorites and he’s convinced aliens are targeting him from outer space. Miodownik concedes the man has a point – five hits in six months is “statistically highly improbable” – but he’s not interested in the source of the meteorites so much as their substance. Even one would be a perfect addition to an implausible repository he founded eight years ago, the Materials Library at King’s College London.

Deep in the bowels of a brutalist concrete building on the Strand, long shelves are packed – crammed, really – with some of the world’s strangest substances, from the past, present and sometimes, it seems, the future. Take Aerogel: the world’s lightest solid consists of 99.8 per cent air and looks like a vague, hazy mass. And yet despite its insubstantial nature, it is remarkably strong; and because of its ability to nullify convection, conduction and radiation, it also happens to be the best insulator in the world. Sitting next to the Aerogel is its thermal opposite, a piece of aluminium nitride, which is such an effective conductor of heat that if you grasp a blunt wafer of it in your hand, the warmth of your body alone allows it to cut through ice. Nearby are panes of glass that clean themselves, metal that remembers the last shape it was twisted into, and a thin tube of Tin Stick which, when bent, emits a sound like a human cry. There’s a tub of totally inert fluorocarbon liquid into which any electronic device can be placed and continue to function. The same liquid has been used to replace the blood in lab rats, which also, oddly enough, continue to function.

There are turbine jet-engine blades grown from a single crystal and designed to function in the most inhospitable places on the planet. There’s a swatch of the world’s blackest black, 25 times blacker than conventional black paint. There’s a lead bell that refuses to ring, a piece of bone with a saw through it, and the largest blob of Silly Putty you’re ever likely to see.

All these, and more than 900 others, including everyday materials such as aluminium, steel and copper, are here for one purpose – to instil a sense of wonder in the visitor. That’s Miodownik’s vision, at least. He is 39 years old and a reader in computational materials science. With his neatly cropped beard, balding head and dark-rimmed glasses, he exudes an affable, boffin-like charm. But there’s a gleam in his eye, of someone who knows the secret order of things. He dates his interest in materials to his purchase, as a schoolboy, of a clear, acrylic ruler advertised as shatterproof. When the ruler shattered into a hundred pieces – on being smacked against the skull of a schoolyard bully – Miodownik was shocked: “I was so appalled by this I went back to the newsagent with the evidence and confronted them with it. They said, ‘You can have another one,’ but I had to say, ‘No! The point is it’s not shatterproof. You’ve either got to change the name or get rid of the whole stock!’”

The shop owners couldn’t be bothered. “But I cared. And I wanted to know how you could make a shatterproof ruler. What was shattering anyway? Why do some things shatter and others don’t?” His obsession led him to a PhD in turbine jet-engine alloys at Oxford University and on to his present role as head of the Materials Research Group at King’s.

Miodownik’s library includes diffusion bonded aluminium wafers, used in the aerospace industry

The creation of the Materials Library was, in some respects, a direct response to his dissatisfaction at the way materials science was taught to him. At Oxford, he never saw or touched the materials that he found so exciting. Some of his fellow students finished PhDs on materials they had never seen in their lives. Miodownik couldn’t face that prospect: “I think it’s quite hard to cope with if you’re someone who cares about sensual experience. I couldn’t survive being someone who just did theory.” He soon found himself collecting odd materials and using them as a teaching resource. “I’d pull out this drawer and say ‘this is what it’s all about’ and I’d put something in [his students’] hands that would just make them be amazed. If you want to understand and innovate new materials, you first of all have to understand their place in the world and your connection with them at this human level.” Word of his peculiar collection soon got out and he was contacted by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta), which gave him £70,000 to found what became the Materials Library.

The materials at the library are not labelled for visitors, leaving people to touch and smell first, and to react instinctively. “It’s a way into science for arts people,” Miodownik says. “And for the scientists it’s a lesson in aesthetics and the sensual nature of what they’re doing. It’s a place for people to go to who have an idea floating around the back of their head that hasn’t bubbled to the surface yet.” He and his fellow curators receive about 20 e-mails a week from people who want to visit the museum, mainly art students. Its open days are swamped. But calls from fellow scientists have been fewer. “They don’t really work that way,” Miodownik explains with a sigh. “They don’t really believe in their subconscious.”

. . .

Materials libraries are one of the newest and most intriguing manifestations of materials science, which is itself a relatively new term to describe an age-old discipline – the study of the relationship between the molecular structure of materials and their perceptible physical properties, such as hardness, softness, flexibility or brittleness. In the past, the study of materials fell under metallurgy, chemistry and solid-state physics. But in the last half-century, with more new materials being created than in all previous history, their sheer variety – plastics, semiconductors, biomaterials – could no longer be understood merely within the classical disciplines.

One of this new science’s founding fathers was J.E. Gordon, who in 1968 published The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don’t Fall Through the Floor, a book which described the world’s structures as a collection of finely calibrated stresses and strains. Gordon was an entertaining, if somewhat eccentric, educator. He explained Newton’s third law of motion thus: “The wind, blowing where it listeth, pushes on my chimney pots, but the chimney pots, bless them, push back at the wind just as hard.” Even the most desolate of phenomena, such as crack propagation in brittle solids by dynamic loading, was explained in terms of a child breaking “the most intractable toffee” with a poker. His book became a set text for students of both A-level physics and O-level English literature.

Gordon’s hypothesis was that materials have an inherent character and vitality. The ancients suspected as much, albeit more literally. The Babylonians used human embryos in their glass-making, while in Japan swords were quenched by plunging them, red-hot, into the bodies of prisoners.

A magnetic liquid called a ferro fluid

An equally influential figure in early materials science was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith, who wrote on the origins of scientific and technological processes. In a 1970 essay, “Art, Technology and Science”, Smith stated that art and aesthetics had for millennia provided much of the inspiration for technology. Fire-hardened clay figurines predated fired pots. The first use of metal, in the fourth millennium BC, was for decorative buttons, not weapons or tools. During the Renaissance, Venetian glassmakers not only produced exquisite chandeliers but also the lenses for Galileo’s telescopes. And painters have traditionally done the work of chemists in seeking brighter and longer-lasting pigments.

Miodownik is doing his best to carry on both scientists’ creeds. He has created an installation on fluorescence at the Hayward Gallery – to tie in with an exhibition by American artist Dan Flavin – and will this autumn help the Victoria and Albert Museum launch its new ceramics galleries. Miodownik also invites artists to speak to his materials science students.

“I think they were terrified for the first half-hour,” says Andrew Shoben of the public art collective Greyworld. “But by the end of it you could see their eyes and minds opening. After all, the Materials Library is, in a lot of ways, like an artist’s studio.”

. . .

The Materials Library is populated largely through the endless rounds of materials conferences Miodownik attends. “Scientists stand up and say such things as, ‘My material changes shape when you shout at it,’” he says. “Of course this material would never end up anywhere because it was either toxic or expensive.” Many new materials would never make it out of the lab but for Miodownik persuading scientists to give him samples. “I had this idea that I wanted these orphan materials to have a place to be. A home.”

Miodownik often talks about the denizens of his library with a paternalistic language. He describes them as misfits and orphans who can’t make it in the real world on their own. “I love materials because I don’t see as much of a difference between them and me, I see a continuum,” he explains.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many of his colleagues see him as an oddball and the library as an oddity. He takes this in his stride. But when they ask him about the library’s usefulness, he’s less demure. The word “utility” haunts him. “I don’t know what it’s useful for! I don’t even care what it’s useful for!

“To keep [the library] running means getting more grants, and that means interacting with someone commercial. They invariably want the library to be a tool for architects and designers, but that always ends up specifying [how materials can be used in new] products, and that’s not something I’m really interested in.”

Others, however, are keenly interested. At a large white table in a large white room in New York this spring, a dozen of the city’s leading design minds had settled down for a debate – over the merits of a handful of new materials. “This looks like a new Formica,” said one man, of a nano-composite coating made out of rotten carrots. The others nodded in agreement and ticked the boxes marked “accept” on their voting sheets. “This looks like an elegant muppet,” said another, of an imitation fur made out of polyester microfibre. Boxes marked “reject” were swiftly ticked. The materials being discussed included a plastic made from waste potato starch, a super-absorbing polymer that can swell to 1,000 times its dry weight, and a compostable plastic which, the designers suggest, would make “good coffin material”.

Handpicked from research laboratories around the world, the materials were being judged by their novelty, usefulness and aesthetic value. There had already been a preliminary round to whittle the number of materials down to these 17, and some of those shortlisted were wilting under the scrutiny. The super-absorbing polymer was dipped into a glass of water but failed to absorb much, instead secreting a slimy gel. There was little sympathy in the group for materials that didn’t perform, or worse, didn’t look good. If the swatch of recycled down-like material in my hand could have sweated – which, with its natural wicking properties, seemed highly unlikely – it would have been doing so.

A designer at work at Materials ConneXion

This jury is responsible for choosing new subjects to enter a very different materials library – that of Material ConneXion, one of the handful of commercial materials collections to have sprung up in the past decade. At the heart of the group’s Madison Avenue headquarters are 2,000 materials on display (another 2,500 are in storage), each pinned neatly to grey boards labelled with the materials’ names and structural properties. New materials are added each month by the ever-changing jury, and catalogued in the company’s database, access to which can be gained by annual subscription (which ranges from $250 for an online subscription to $20,000 for an onsite corporate membership). Newcomers include Fabrican, tiny fibres suspended in an aerosol solution that can be sprayed directly on to the skin to form instant garments; rigid metal cushions inflated by a proprietary process; and farmed stingray hides that look like gleaming mottled leather.

While design schools and chemical companies often maintain an in-house materials library, none is as extensive or up-to-date as this. Divided into like groups (polymers, concrete-based materials, glass), the library is as pristine and orderly as its British cousin is cluttered and chaotic. It was founded in 1997 by George Beylerian, a rambunctious retailer of high-end furniture and formerly a creative director for the Steelcase furniture company, and today it employs 25 people. The company’s other main revenue stream, aside from subscriptions, are its licensees – there are ­identical libraries in Bangkok, Cologne, Milan and Daegu – and consulting work, on anything from engineering applications to fashion. The company’s aim is to offer architects and product designers a vast array of ground-breaking new materials.

Some of its recent ventures have included working on BMW’s Gina concept car, released in 2008, in which the car’s metal frame was wrapped in a fabric discovered within the library. Choosing a textile skin made assembly easier and drastically reduced the car’s weight. Other clients include Estée Lauder, Chanel and Nike, which, after a trip to the library, incorporated a type of monofilament sleeving normally used to protect PVC pipes from bursting into the design of their Air Jordan sneakers. The sleeving’s braid allowed it to flex without stretching permanently, thus eliminating the need for laces.

Although Beylerian remains the guiding spirit behind the company, Andrew Dent, its vice-president, provides the hard science background. Dent, a year younger than Miodownik, stands at an imposing 6ft 5in (although his Mohawk hairstyle makes him seem even taller) and received his doctorate in materials science from Cambridge University before working for the Ministry of Defence, the US Navy and Nasa. It was at Nasa that he realised a problem: “I didn’t like hanging out with scientists, and I’m not a particularly good scientist. I’m much better at translating the science for designers.”

Indeed, when Dent riffs on materials science, he can make it seem a stepping stone to omniscience. “If you sit in any particular room or anywhere on the planet and you look around you and you see every single material, I know exactly what it’s made of, I know how it was made, I know why it performs the way it does, I know how to change its performance if I want to. Nothing around me feels alien to me because I know what it is.” Dent’s take on the wonders of materials science may seem more megalomaniacal in tone than Miodownik’s holistic sensibility, but it is no less stimulating.

. . .

At Material ConneXion, Dent plays the role of matchmaker: he finds people with a material need and others with a solution and brings them together. He’s worked with the Philippine government, for example, on demonstrating that the country’s indigenous materials – oyster shells, lahar, bamboo – can be used to create relatively high-value products at high volumes for interior designers and architects.

Ironically, the growth of the consulting side of the business may prove the biggest obstacle to the continued operation of its library. Although it is a wonderful marketing tool, running it is labour-intensive. As the company seeks to expand and diversify into more formal innovation management – Beylerian talks of setting up a business that puts inventors in touch with manufacturers – both Dent and Beylerian admit that they don’t know how much longer the library can exist in its present form. There is talk of turning it into an educational tool for colleges, or finding a corporate sponsor.

Mark Miodownik refuses to commercialise his collection: ’Ask not what materials can do for you, but what you can do for materials’

Meanwhile, back in the basement of King’s College, Miodownik is staring intently at a tiny phial, inside which is an even tinier fish. “What on earth is this?” he asks. The Materials Library has no star chamber through which its materials must pass for inclusion. Other than those Miodownik and his staff track down themselves, each week they are sent a handful of parcels and envelopes holding the weird and wonderful. One week they were sent a lump of floating concrete. Another week, a dress made of parachute silk floated in. Through fellowships and grants from Nesta, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and a host of other acronyms, Miodownik keeps his library alive. He is adamant about not commercialising it. “It’s such a narrow way of looking at materials. We don’t want to enslave them, we want to nurture them.”

And, half-joking: “Ask not what materials can do for you, but what you can do for materials.”

Commercialising would also mean streamlining. Miodownik estimates that barely 5 per cent of the materials in his library are also in Material ConneXion’s. “The Materials Library has a big tub of mercury in it,” he explains. “Now you’re never going to specify a product with mercury in it. It’s toxic. In fact everyone’s trying to get rid of mercury. But it should exist in a materials library, because it may give you an idea about something, it may embody some philosophical thought. It’s a physical embodiment of something in an Aristotelian way.

“I really don’t think [utility] is a criteria for having things in a university. The world is run by people who want things to be ‘useful’ and that’s great, but universities should be these places of awe and craziness – they shouldn’t be the ‘real’ world.”

As Material ConneXion considers passing on its library to a non-profit or corporate patron, so Miodownik believes that the best long-term result might be the foundation of a British Materials Library, as filled with wonders as the British Museum. In the meantime, he is busying himself with his latest project – a study of the taste of materials. He and his colleagues have crafted a variety of spoons made from different materials for people to taste at an upcoming event. But before that happens, some research into the science of taste is due.

“A metal that’s tasty in your mouth often has a more negative reduction potential [a susceptibility to being oxidised], whereas metals which have less taste, such as silver or gold, have less negative reduction potentials,” he explains. But there are some exceptions to this rule: aluminium has a highly negative reduction potential but doesn’t have much taste, which is unusual, especially because aluminium foil does. “Just the thought of putting aluminium foil into your mouth,” Miodownik wrinkles his face up, “one emotionally gets a weird feeling.” He pauses, clutching the aluminium spoon in his hand, contemplating the strangeness of it all, then looks up and smiles. “I mean, that’s my life.”

George Pendle is the author of ‘Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons’