Generalised crystallography

Abstract

In our preoccupation with the detailed problems of our daily work of finding out how atoms are arranged in space, we are in danger of losing sight of the whole picture and of not seeing what the picture shows, nor what it means, nor where our part fits in. In the art world there is a place for the critic. A case has been made that there is also scope for the science critic, and yon will indeed see stimulating science criticism, particularly in the pages of Nature, Science and the New Scientist. I think that quite inadequate attention has been paid to the philosophy, ideology and general pattern of our subject, and this is what I want to discuss, bearing in mind that the division of nature and learning into subjects has no natural basis, and is only a concession to human weakness and a convenience for bureaucracy. There is, I believe, a genuine crisis of identity in the field of crystallography, which has followed on the success of the modern techniques of structure determination. Like the art critic, I want to attack the traditional beliefs and to support the view that a science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost. I will therefore not mention von Laue, Bragg or Bernal, but immediately commit the blasphemy of suggesting that crystallography is only incidentally concerned with crystals and that its real objectives today must be different. Our objectives must be to understand regular structures.