Abstract
THE importance of particle parity, non-symmetric tensors in crystals, and other mirror-image properties, requires that a previous communication1 be amplified, which suggested that, following Kelvin2, Larmor and Eddington, the term ‘chirality’ be used for the property characterizing three-dimensional forms not superposable on their mirror images. Kelvin wrote3 “I call any geometrical figure, or any group of points, chiral, and say it has chirality, if its image in a plane mirror, ideally realized, cannot be brought to coincide with itself”. Unfortunately the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary—“chiral, the power of certain crystals and optically active substances of turning the plane of polarization of light to the right or left hand”—is not only less fundamental but misleads, since it is theoretically possible for crystals of four non-enantiomorphous classes (m, mm2, &4bar;, &42bar;m), which are not chiral in Kelvin's sense, to display optical activity4, though no example has yet been positively established.
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References
Whyte, L. L., Nature, 180, 513 (1957).
See loc. cit., or “Oxford English Dictionary”, 1933 Supplement, under ‘chirality’.
Robert Boyle Lecture (May 16, 1893), printed in “Baltimore Lectures”, Appendix H, p. 439 (1904).
Wooster, W. A., “Text Book on Crystal Physics”, 155 (1938). Bunn, C. W., “Chemical Crystallography”, 88 (1946).
Mackay, A. L., Acta Crystal., 10, 543 (1957).
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WHYTE, L. Chirality. Nature 182, 198 (1958). https://doi.org/10.1038/182198a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/182198a0
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