Crystal Structure Quotes

In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is nonetheless a living being

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

On a submicro scale, pure diamond is billions of billions of carbon atoms bonded to one another. If you shrunk yourself down and stood inside the diamond, you'd see nothing but carbon in a perfect pattern in every direction.

Normally, you would not call ice a mineral.

Boron is carbon's neighbor on the periodic table, which means it can do a passable carbon impression and wriggle its way into the matrix of a diamond. But it has one fewer electron, so it can't quite form the same four perfect bonds.

One of the memorable moments of my life was when Willard Libby came to Princeton with a little jar full of crystals of barium xenate. A stable compound, looking like common salt, but much heavier. This was the magic of chemistry, to see xenon trapped into a crystal.

For X-rays, the phenomenon of diffraction by crystals was a natural consequence of the idea that X-rays are waves analogous to light and differ from it only by having a smaller wavelength.

If the chain symmetry is maintained in the crystal lattice, the possible occurrence of different space groups is considerably restricted.

The main thread of my work is structure property relations and materials. If you have certain atoms, why do they attract each other? Why do they make compounds? Why do they do what they do?

With crystals we are in a situation similar to an attempt to investigate an optical grating merely from the spectra it produces... But a knowledge of the positions and intensities of the spectra does not suffice for the determination of the structure. The phases with which the diffracted waves vibrate relative to one another enter in an essential way. To determine a crystal structure on the atomic scale, one must know the phase differences between the different interference spots on the photographic plate, and this task may certainly prove to be rather difficult.

Diamond, for all its great beauty, is not nearly as interesting as the hexagonal plane of graphite. It is not nearly as interesting because we live in a three-dimensional space, and in diamond, each atom is surrounded in all three directions in space by a full coordination.

It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.

I should not like to leave an impression that all structural problems can be settled by X-ray analysis or that all crystal structures are easy to solve. I seem to have spent much more of my life not solving structures than solving them.

I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, 'Concerning the Nature of Things.'

Elementary considerations led me to the conclusion that a medium, composed of layers of different dielectric constants, must behave as a uniaxial crystal if it is assumed that the layer thicknesses are only a fraction of a wave-length.

On April 8, 1982, I was alone in the electron microscope room when I discovered the Icosahedral Phase that opened the field of quasi-periodic crystals.