Ned Thomas / Chris Schuh / "metallurgy is dead

Tom's running argument with his then-associate-head about the relevance of metals. Used to set up the "Future of Metals" paper in §5.p10.

Ned Thomas, who was my associate head and a polymer guy the whole time I was department head — he'd say, oh, metallurgy's dead. When Chris Schuh became a young faculty member here 14 years ago, I said, what's your specialty? He says, I'm a metallurgist. I said, oh, don't say that, the Dean will just hate that. Because people like Ned Thomas — idiots like Ned Thomas, I said that on tape — he's Dean at Rice University now, that was MIT's gain and Rice's loss when he left here to go to Rice. He thought that steel was dead, and he used to go around preaching this. Was he right? No, he was wrong. Any idiot who thinks about it would have known he was wrong. I told him he was wrong. He didn't like that.