Abstract
BY holding a conference on Liquid Crystals and Anisotropic Melts at the Royal Institution on April 24-25, the Faraday Society has rendered a service not only to the cause of international science but particularly to science in Great Britain, for it has long been a regrettable fact that this interesting and important subject has been practically unknown here. So much so, that in the symposium volume on liquid crystals published by the Zeitschrift für Krystallographie, there was not one contribution from an English worker in the field. In part, this neglect has been due to the apparent multiplicity and complexity of the phenomena of liquid crystals, and in part to the prolonged and violent controversies to which their interpretation gave rise. This is a situation to which the holding of the Faraday Society conference has definitely put an end. We now have, as a result of the discussions, a fairly coherent picture of the nature and importance of liquid crystals: and though differences still remain, they will now, far more than in the past, lead to fresh fields of research rather than to controversy.
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The photographs reproduced as Figs. 1, 2 and 3, were taken by Dr. Lawrence at the Colloid Physics Department, Cambridge.
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Liquid Crystals. Nature 132, 86–89 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132086a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132086a0