Crystallography

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2012

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the history of crystallography, the study of crystals and their structure. The discovery in the early 20th century that X-rays could be diffracted by a crystal revolutionised our knowledge of materials. This crystal technology has touched most people's lives, thanks to the vital role it plays in diverse scientific disciplines - from physics and chemistry, to molecular biology and mineralogy. To date, 28 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to scientists working with X-ray crystallography, an indication of its crucial importance. The history of crystallography began with the work of Johannes Kepler in the 17th century, but perhaps the most crucial leap in understanding came with the work of the father-and-son team the Braggs in 1912. They built on the work of the German physicist Max von Laue who had proved that X-rays are a form of light waves and that it was possible to scatter these rays using a crystal. The Braggs undertook seminal experiments which transformed our perception of crystals and their atomic arrangements, and led to some of the most significant scientific findings of the last century - such as revealing the structure of DNA. With: Judith Howard Director of the Biophysical Sciences Institute and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Durham Chris Hammond Life Fellow in Material Science at the University of Leeds Mike Glazer Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor of Physics at the University of Warwick Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:02.4	For more details about in our time and for our terms of use please go to BBC.co.
0:07.1	UK slash radio for.
0:09.1	I hope you enjoy the programme.
0:11.1	Hello in a letter to a colleague the Nobel Prize winning chemist Max Perroutz tried to convey the crucial
0:16.3	importance of crystallography to our understanding of the world. Perroutz wrote that the
0:21.1	technique explains why blood is red and grass is green, why
0:26.2	diamond is hard and wax is soft, why graphite writes on paper and silk is strong, why glaciers flow and iron gets hard when you hammer it.
0:36.0	Crystalography is the study of the structure of solids and for centuries our knowledge of
0:40.9	crystal structures was based on little more than their physical
0:43.8	appearance. But a hundred years ago, in 1912 the father and son team of Lawrence and William
0:48.8	Bragg developed X-ray crystallography, a technique which uses x-rays to work out the precise arrangements of atoms
0:56.1	within a crystal. The ramifications of their discovery revolutionized molecular analysis
1:01.8	across scientific disciplines, and since then 28 Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work related to X-ray crystallography, including one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of science, the discovery of the structure of DNA in
1:15.0	1953.
1:16.8	With me to discuss crystallography are Judith Howard, Professor of Chemistry at the University
1:21.9	of Durham.
1:23.0	Chris Hammond, Life Fellow in Material Science at the University of Leeds
1:27.0	and Mike Glazer, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford
1:31.0	and Visiting Professor of Physics at the University of Warwick.
1:34.0	Juliet Howard, before we go into the history of crystallography and explore its many achievements,
1:38.8	could you explain what it is?
	...

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