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Crystals

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Symmetry through the Eyes of a Chemist

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Abstract

... But I must speak again about crystals, shapes, colors. There are crystals as huge as the colonnade of a cathedral, soft as mould, prickly as thorns; pure, azure, green, like nothing else in the world, fiery black; mathematically exact, complete, like constructions by crazy, capricious scientists, or reminiscent of the liver, the heart ... There are crystal grottos, monstrous bubbles of mineral mass, there is fermentation, fusion, growth of minerals, architecture and engineering art ... Even in human life there is a hidden force towards crystallization. Egypt crystallizes in pyramids and obelisks, Greece in columns; the middle ages in vials; London in grinny cubes ... Like secret mathematical flashes of lightning the countless laws of construction penetrate the matter. To equal nature it is necessary to be mathematically and geometrically exact. Number and phantasy, law and abundance—these are the living, creative strengths of nature; not to sit under a green tree but to create crystals and to form ideas, that is what it means to be at one with nature!

...all the works of the crystallographers ...demonstrate that there is only variety everywhere where they suppose uniformity...

Georges Leclerc [Comte de] Buffon (1707–1788) [1]

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A. I. Kitaigorodskii’s name appears in two versions in this book and even more in the literature. The rules of transliterations from the original Russian suggest Kitaigorodskii, but his name was transliterated on many of his publications as Kitaigorodsky.

  2. 2.

    Another version is also attributed to Kitaigorodskii, “The molecule also has a body; when it’s hit, it feels hurt all over.” This implied the possibility of structural changes in the molecule upon entering the crystal structure, a symbolic departure from Kitaigorodskii’s earlier views about the constancy of molecular geometry regardless whether in the gas phase or in the crystal.

  3. 3.

    Alan L. Mackay gave two remarkable lectures on fivefold symmetry at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, in September, 1982, where he issued this warning.

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    Magdolna Hargittai & István Hargittai

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Hargittai, M., Hargittai, I. (2009). Crystals. In: Symmetry through the Eyes of a Chemist. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5628-4_9

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