- Series:God’s Design, Transcript English
Genesis 1:31
“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
If you want to learn a new subject, find a master at the subject and copy them. If you want to lose weight, find someone who has already lost weight. If you want to program video games, find the ace games programmer and become her apprentice. And if you want to design ingenious and innovative new materials, go to the master designer Himself – God.
Unfortunately, many engineers who might benefit from imitating God’s material designs do not give Him the glory, maintaining instead that they are imitating nature.
One example of material design, following what is seen of God’s design in nature, is that of fish scales. Scientists at Montreal’s McGill University experimented on fish scales by puncturing them and examining the results under microscopes.
If you have work gloves, you will know that you need them to be both flexible and strong. They should be strong enough to resist puncture, yet flexible enough to allow comfortable working. McGill University’s François Barthelat realized that fish scales had the properties required. The fish’s skin is indeed flexible, but it was discovered that individual scales are very tough and are actually well resistant to puncture and damage. Barthelat’s team discovered how fish scales fractured, deformed and interacted in order to develop new materials based on the properties that they discovered. Their resulting artificial scales had to be made in a manner akin to overlapping tiles, so that large surfaces could be covered. The whole process relies on the research into materials, which could only have been designed by God.
Thank You, Lord, for the wisdom, beauty, and sheer ingenuity of all that You have made. Amen.
Author: Paul F. Taylor
Ref: Engineers Look to Fish Scales for Tough Materials, , accessed 10/5/2017. Image: Alligator Gar, license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
