Crystal garden

In this crystal garden, all the crystals are basically sodium silicate. Pure sodium silicate crystals are colorless, but in the areas around the metallic salts, the sodium silicate incorporated some of the metal molecules. These produced much of the color effect. The greater the number of facets (flat faces) on each crystal, the more beautiful is the crystal garden. The more facets there are, the more angles there are, and these reflect and refract (bend) the light. Refraction causes the light to disperse, or break up into many beautiful colors. 

The word chemical can conjure up images of goo, globs, and glops, but usually not pictures of nice, neat, orderly structures. But solid-state chemicals can be wonderfully symmetric and elegantly structured. Beautiful, mathematical symmetry is evident in the crystal garden demonstration and is exhibited in even a grain of salt. Here we will examine the forces that bring about such structure and other phenomena associated with the solid state of matter. 

When this logical explanation was first put forward, however, it was not met with instant universal approbation. The proponents of the idea were labeled daft, or worse, and had to endure the criticism. But time proved them out. To explain the observed crystal structure in salt, sugar, and the crystal garden, we now embrace the three-dimensional nature of atoms, molecules, and ions in our three-dimensional world. 

In this respect inorganic systems can also be manipulated to form functional compartments. Similar to the crystal gardens [11-13] we, in preliminary work, have demonstrated that it is possible to take crystals of a polyoxometalate material and transform the crystalline state into a functional semi-permable membrane and osmotically pump material through a tubular structure formed by the metal-oxide membrane during crystal dissolution, see Fig. 5.5. Such processes could well be used to develop a POM-based CHELL. 

You can obtain an inorganic garden . For this purpose, pour 30-50 ml of a liquid glass solution into a beaker and drop crystals of cobalt, iron(II), aluminium, nickel, copper, and calcium salts into the solution. What is observed ... 

Molecule sieving as exhibited by zeolites depends upon the free dimensions of the meshes giving access to the interior of the crystals relative to those of the potential guest molecule presented to the mesh. Like garden... 

It was based on these uniqueness and commonalities, my colleague and I submitted a paper entitled Crystal Structure and A Unique martensitic Transition of TiNi to a Journal concerned with metals and alloys for publication in 1965. But, the paper was rejected outright by two anonymous reviewers who could not accept our observation that the Nitinol transition was unique. Obviously the reviews contend that by accepting Nitinol transition being unique, may make all other martensitic transformations garden variety. This may upset the theory of martensitic transition formulated thus far. We then, submitted the paper to the Journal of Applied Physics and was accepted for publication and eventually appeared in print [10]. A few months after the appearance of this article, the editor of the very journal that rejected my paper, asked me to review two papers on Nitinol for the journal. Suddenly, I was an undisputed expert in Nitinol Up to this point I had not really start to apply covalent-bond concept but devoting more time in collecting experimental data [14,15], which may be important in support or non-support of covalent-bond concept. 

As with single crystal lamellae, there are a range of complex morphologies that can be observed, but we wish to focus on just a few key features of the ordinary common or garden spherulites. Figure 8-58 showed an actual micrograph of spherulites in the pro-... 

Holden, A., and Singer, P. Crystals and Crystal Growing. Anchor Books, Doubleday Garden City, NY (1960). 

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