I cannot explain my curiosity about extreme phenomena in nature; nevertheless I have been drawn to the science that surrounds them – from those occurring on the scale of solar systems to those at work at the smallest regimes within matter. Extreme forces surround us; they govern our weather, the cores of planets, components of engineering structures and the ordering of particles within atoms. At the scales of interest in this book they are either gravitational or electrostatic in origin. Forces drive mechanical routes to impose change and materials are forced to respond to these pressures in non-linear, counter-intuitive and utterly fascinating manners; frequently more quickly than not only the senses, but the recording media that exist today can track. Nothing that changes does so instantaneously; every mechanism takes some time, however small. This mean that the integrated response follows a delicate framework of competing pathways that reorder as the driver for the forces changes. As with many processes, one can only see patterns apparent in retrospect. Furthermore, the difficulties encountered achieving these states mean that there are many untracked routes that matter can take to respond about which we know little. Thus despite the years this book has taken to come to this point, it can only provide a snapshot of behaviour as I see it.

Nevertheless, matter allows the nature of its bonding to be probed by subjecting it to load and the reader will learn to appreciate the variety of materials behaviours and their causes that allow the design of structures or even new materials to withstand the environments considered. The behaviours observed are complex and seemingly counter-intuitive, and quantifying them has frequently filled books in the past with extended solid mechanics. This has made texts rich in analysis and specialised in application and required the reader to be expert in the mathematics of non-linear behaviour. However, it seemed that a reader with an appreciation of the physical sciences and elementary algebra required an open text to emphasise behaviours not analytical subtleties. Thus this book unites principles covering a broad canvas at a level accessible to graduate students. Further, it addresses the regime in which the strength of matter may be described with extensions of solid mechanics at the continuum rather than extrapolation of atomic theory and quantum mechanics at the atomic scale.