Crystallography365.wordpress.com Website Review

And here we are at the end, a year since our first post – on the structure that started it all, salt repeat, did you notice?) we are at the end of the Crystallography 365 project and the end of the International Year of Crystallography We’re thinking about the legacy for the project, if nothing else we’ll make sure all the structure pictures we’ve drawn make it to Wikipedia, upping the amount of crystal structures there. We’ll make sure all the structures we found that weren’t in the Crystallography As the International Year of Crystallography gives way to the International Year of Light, we end the #Crystallography365 series with a retrospective of how research in optics has advanced crystallography, and a prospective on how it will do so in the future. Maxwell had shown that light was a transverse electromagnetic wave, Rontgen properties of cathode rays. Rontgen’s mysterious x-rays captured worldwide attention; but particularly that of Arnold Sommerfeld’s. Although a theoretician himself, he had as*embled an impressive group of experimentalists in his research group. Sommerfeld had surmised that that x-rays were transverse EM waves with a wavelength on the order of 1 angstrom, and furthermore that diffraction through a materials diffract x-rays, thus in just one single experiment demonstrating the wave nature of x-rays and the lattice structure of spots and structure. Later, using optics and engineering, W.H. Bragg (the father) constructed the first x-ray spectrometer, and Weissenberg The invention of synchrotron light sources and advances in x-ray optics have boosted crystallography to new heights. Synchrotrons were first built for particle physics applications. X-ray radiation production in synchrotrons is an energy-sapping nuisance, and literally holes needed to be drilled in the particle pipe to let the x-rays out. Of course scientists soon realized that this ‘waste crystallographers more and more brilliant monochromatic x-rays, and with the ability to get higher and higher resolutions in both space