Early Days of X-ray Crystallography

Front Cover
OUP Oxford, 2013 - Science - 441 pages
The year 2012 marked the centenary of one of the most significant discoveries of the early twentieth century, the discovery of X-ray diffraction (March 1912, by Laue, Friedrich and Knipping) and of Bragg's law (November 1912). The discovery of X-ray diffraction confirmed the wave nature of X-rays and the space-lattice hypothesis. It had two major consequences: the analysis of the structure of atoms, and the determination of the atomic structure of materials. This had a momentous impact in chemistry, physics, mineralogy, material science, biology and X-ray spectroscopy.

The book relates the discovery itself, the early days of X-ray crystallography, and the way the news of the discovery spread round the world. It explains how the first crystal structures were determined by William Bragg and his son Lawrence, and recounts which were the early applications of X-ray crystallography in chemistry, mineralogy, materials science, physics, biological sciences and X-ray spectroscopy. It also tells how the concept of space lattice developed since ancient times up to the nineteenth century, and how our conception of the nature of light has changed over time. The contributions of the main actors of the story, prior to the discovery, at the time of the discovery and immediately afterwards, are described through their writings and are put into the context of the time, accompanied by brief biographical details.

This thoroughly researched account on the multiple faces of a scientific specialty, X-ray crystallography, is aimed both at the scientists, who rarely subject the historical material of past discoveries in their field to particular scrutiny with regard to the historical details and at the historians of science who often lack the required expert knowledge to scrutinize the involved technical content in sufficient depth (M. Eckert - Metascience).
 

Contents

1 Significance of the discovery of Xray diffraction
1
2 The various approaches to the concept of space lattice
9
3 The dual nature of light
23
4 Röntgen and the discovery of Xrays
52
waves or corpuscles?
63
The discovery of Xray diffraction and the birth of Xray analysis
83
The first steps
130
8 The route to crystal structure determination
170
9 Xrays as a branch of optics
213
10 Early applications of Xray crystallography
230
the forerunners
270
12 The birth and rise of the spacelattice concept
318
References
401
Author Index
433
Subject Index
439
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About the author (2013)

Andre Authier, Professor Emeritus, Department of Mineralogy and Materials Physics, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris Andre Authier is Professor Emeritus at the Institut de Mineralogie, de Physique des Materiaux et de Cosmochimie, Universite P. et M. Curie in Paris. He was Full Professor at Paris University and former president of the International Union of Crystallography.