Re:while historical chemical advances (Score 1)

Not true. Your view is a vary narrow one. Processes and implementation are still being discovered every day by these "garage tinkerers".

There is a belief that all these wonderful new ideas come out of corporations and businesses but, if you learned anything from Bill Gates, most of these wonderful things come from your neighbor working in his garage on his days off because he has a thought or idea he wants to test.

A friend of mine actually invented, in his own garage lab, a plastic that has the properties of rubber and was/is scalable and customizable. Though the chemical formula is common and known, the order and assembly was not. Computers can tell us the properties of a certain molecule/compound but it CANNOT tell you how to make it. Little things like temperature, pressure, whether assembly is in a pure oxygen or a pure nitrogen environment, all lead to different outcomes.

Take an inorganic chemistry course at your local college and you will be FLOORED by the vastness of elemental compounds that have NEVER been researched.

We have an ENTIRE course of study for one element, Carbon. Thats one element out of many.

An accident in a kitchen led to the entire plastic industry. (another element/process)

I will predict LOTS AND LOTS of new and wonderful materials to rise out of the digital age. We are almost to the point of putting into a program the properties we want in a material and have the program give us the formula. But computers still don't have the ability to tell us how to assemble them...

I am very excited for the future of materials. We are seeing only the tip of the iceberg in this industry. I only hope governmental shortsightedness doesn't stifle innovation.