Crystallography

For many years I have been interested in why a science of crystallography came into being with the form and at the time it did, what its relation is to other physical sciences and what the future is liable to hold for it. When this lecture was first decided on I planned to make of it a more or less comprehensive lecture on the history of crystallography—one is needed. But I am not going to do this mainly because I have recently had to make certain unexpected major decisions that have consumed the time that would have been needed to document so serious a talk. There is, however, point to even some rambling comments on the growth of crystallography; we are already too inclined to take our subject for granted and to forget that little more than a generation ago the study of crystals was something carried out in very few universities and then usually in a bare attic room whose sole equipment consisted of a few pearwood models and some mineral specimens removed for the afternoon from the neighboring mineralogical museum. Crystallography was generally considered a useful adjunct to the blowpipe as a way of identifying minerals, but not much more. The discovery that practically all solids, rather than only a few curiosities of nature, are crystalline made this obscurity a thing of the past and demonstrated that a concern with crystalline order must provide the nucleus for an expanding science of solid bodies.

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