Reddit reviews Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction

Any will do. Callister is good (and apparently cheap if you buy it used).

When materials crack (that's a clean break between atoms), we call that fracture. Whether a material fractures at the grain boundaries or through the grain is a whole field unto its self called fracture mechanics. There are many things we can do to materials that either promote breaking along grain boundaries or through the grains.

Generally speaking, ceramics break as a fracture and metals don't. That's my ceramics are brittle and metals bend (ductile).

Again generally speaking plastics don't have grains. We call this amorphous. They are composed of long hydrocarbon chains. You can think of a bowl of spaghetti. The spaghetti is stuck together with weak interatomic bonds. Like spaghetti that's gone cold and doesn't have oil on it. Under special cases these chains can align, and polymer scientist would say that they form grains. But it's not quite the same as with metals and ceramics.

Wood is a complicated biological system composed of cells and cell walls. It is amorphous (again, we can define this as no long range ordering of the atoms). I can't really speak to much about wood, but I can say it doesn't have grains.

Again, for material to reattach itself the way it was, it must have no plastic deformation, and the surface must stay clean (i.e. in a vacuum). Of course you could never completely take two surfaces apart and put them back together, because even if it was a clean break, you would have to align the surface properly... down to the atomic level.

I would suggest you read your textbook, if you do not have one pertaining to materials, I would suggest Callister's Mat Sci & Engr: An Intro. Also if you are struggling this early in the semester, you may want to consider visiting the professor during office hours...

The Feynman lectures are really good, and they will take you from basic physics to quantum mechanics.

Get yourself a good groundwork in physics before you worry about flashy things like relativity. The ability to spout out fancy words about fancy-sounding fields really means nothing if you don't actually understand what you are talking about.

Now, this said, once you are ready to dive into quantum mechanics, I'd personally recommend Griffiths.

As a chemical engineer specialized in electron microscopy, I am partial to solid-state physics and physics at the atomic scale, so if you are interested in such small things, I would recommend Callister as an introductory book (it is basically the bible of materials science, and is an excellent beginner book and reference) and Kasap as a very readable book on solid-state physics.

With any such books, unless you are using the book for a class and it is required that you have a particular version, don't worry about getting the newest edition. An older edition will generally save you a lot of money if you purchase a hard copy. That said, it is easy enough to find most of them digitally if you are so inclined.