Macromolecules, Biomolecules, and Supermolecules

Abstract

This chapter is intended to widen the horizons of physicists with regard to the enormous variety of large molecules, and to their significance for physics, chemistry, and biology (Sect. 20.1), as well as to the question of what molecular physicists have already contributed, and can in the future contribute, to this field. Our overview here must necessarily be limited and thus rather superficial. It is intended in the main for students of physics, who might otherwise be left with the impression after studying a text on molecular physics that diatomic molecules are the most important. The present chapter is intended to make it clear that this is not so; and that, on the contrary, the investigation of complex molecular functional units (Sects. 20.5 to 20.7) offers many fascinating and unanswered questions to challenge the molecular physicist.