Crystals That Flow: Classic Papers from the History of Liquid Crystals (The Liquid Crystals Book Series)

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 738 pages
• Published by: CRC
• Edition: 1st Edition June 1, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0415257891
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0415257893
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Weighs: 3 pounds

Product Review
The book is full of fascinating insights and anecdotes… .generally very well produced… .The authors are to be congratulated for producing a book that is both instructive to read, and which will provide an invaluable source of material about the historical development of the liquid crystals field for many years to come.
-J. M. Seddon, Professor of Physical Chemistry and Head, Interfacial and Analytical Science, Chemistry Department, Imperial College, London

The book is full of fascinating insights and anecdotes… .generally very well produced… .The authors are to be congratulated for producing a book that is both instructive to read, and which will provide an invaluable source of material about the historical development of the liquid crystals field for many years to come.
-J. M. Seddon, Professor of Physical Chemistry and Head, Interfacial and Analytical Science, Chemistry Department, Imperial College, London

The book will make delightful reading for any researcher working on liquid crystals, but should be, for various reasons, more generally of value to anyone with an interest in the history of science. … this is a fascinating book that could well find its place in every liquid crystal scientist's personal library
-- Liquid Crystals Today Volume 13, Issue 4, December 2004

The book will make delightful reading for any researcher working on liquid crystals, but should be, for various reasons, more generally of value to anyone with an interest in the history of science. … this is a fascinating book that could well find its place in every liquid crystal scientists personal library
-- Liquid Crystals Today Volume 13, Issue 4, December 2004

Product Description
Liquid crystal science underlies the technology of about half the current display technology by value, an industry now worth some $10 billion per annum worldwide. The fundamental science straddles the disciplines of chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics and computer science. Among liquid crystal scientists today there is much interest in the historical process that has brought the subject to its present level. The historical roots lie in the years following 1888, again in the interwar years, and finally in the late 60s and 70s. This book has collected important papers in the development of liquid crystal science into one reference volume. The collection is divided into sections, each of which is prefaced by a brief commentary, referring to the historic-scientific context of the time. Some of these papers are available for the first time in English. More modern papers carry a short commentary from the original author, offering recollections of the context in which the work was carried out and what its impact has been. Crystals that Flow is aimed at liquid crystal scientists- from whatever background- physics, mathematics, chemistry, engineering or computer science. Historians of science will also find this a useful reference.

Reader Reviews
Liquid crystals (LCs) are remarkable materials whose properties lie between those of solids and those of liquids. They are not only fascinating in their own right - as examples of systems exhibiting a variety of what physicists call `broken symmetries' - but also lend themselves to many practical applications. Paramount amongst these is display devices - everyday items such as the computer screen on which I am typing this review. However, the true nature of LCs was not immediately apparent. It took many false starts over a period of about 100 years till their full potential was duly appreciated. And it was indeed a case of one knowing more about what goes on on the moon than six inches before our noses, for at least one type of LC had been around all along - in the form of wet soap. These are the so-called lyotropic LC phases, whose liquid crystallinity is awakened by the addition of a solvent (most often water). In the type that occurs most commonly in applications, called thermotropic LCs, it is temperature that does the trick - so much so that LC-based devices are restricted to certain operating temperature ranges (thanks to the ingenuity of synthetic chemists these now bracket most temperatures at which one would want to use such devices). The history of LC research has now been brilliantly chronicled by Sluckin, Dunmur and Stegemeyer. Rather than just tell it, they let the characters of the play speak for themselves - mostly through their printed work, since many of them are now dead. `Crystals that Flow' is a collection of 46 `classic papers from the history of liquid crystals'. These are grouped into five sections: the first three cover the early period, the period between the two World Wars, and the modern period. Then there is a section on the development of LC technology, and one final section on an entirely different group of LCs, the lyotropics I have already mentioned above, as well as more complicated LC molecular architectures such as polymer LCs and LC elastomers. These latter are very much at the forefront of current research and so the account is of necessity much less complete. In a scholarly tour de force, many of the papers have been translated afresh from their original languages (French or German) by the editors. Not all papers are reproduced in their entirety, due to their length or to the otherwise lesser relevance of some of their contents; when this happens it is clearly noted, both in the table of contents and in the papers themselves. It is a pleasure to be able to read what the fathers (regrettably no mothers) of the field actually wrote, and to see how many of the ideas we regards as modern are in fact not at all new, having sometimes languished in obscurity for decades only to be rediscovered much later: I for one was awestruck to learn that Maier and Saupe's 1958 theory of the nematic state was already contained in a 1917 paper by Grandjean that no-one appears to have taken notice of! Each section is preceded by an essay some twenty pages long, which sets the research in a wider scientific and societal context and introduces the leading characters, whose short biographies appear after the papers. And what a pleasure these are to read: the story that is told is not the sanitised tale of an inexorable progression towards sure knowledge, but that of all the twists and wrong turns by its human actors that we practicing scientists often do our best to conceal because that's how we think it ought to be, but maybe isn't. This time it wasn't, and a good thing too. The only minus point I see (besides a - very - few typos) is the rather hefty price tag: at over 100 dollars a copy, the book is unaffordable to many potential readers. Let's hope a cheaper edition can be produced for their benefit, the sooner the better.