Question: Hi , How do you feel that your research could help and cause progress in the world of science?

Andrew Cairns answered on 17 Nov 2011:

I don’t believe that the specific area I am working on at the moment wil cause a huge jump in technology, engineering etc, but the academic interest in the mechanisms by which my the materials I work on show their unusual properties may mean we are able to design new materials with very specific or very extreme properties. Furthermore, our work on amorphous materials assists in understanding, for example, a process that is happening hundreds of times a second in your computer, that is the writing and erasing of data on memory! This relies on a crystal to amorphous transition, and the opposite effect when you read/write memory.