Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form

by Esther Leslie

While it is responsible for today’s abundance of flat screens—on televisions, computers, and mobile devices—most of us have only heard of it in the ubiquitous acronym, LCD, with little thought as to exactly what it liquid crystal. In this book, Esther Leslie enlightens us, offering an accessible and fascinating look at—not a substance, not a technology—but a wholly different phase of matter.
            As she explains, liquid crystal is a curious material phase that organizes a substance’s molecules in a crystalline form yet allows them to move fluidly like water. Observed since the nineteenth century, this phase has been a deep curiosity to science and, in more recent times, the key to a new era of media technology. In between that time, as Leslie shows, it has figured in cultural forms from Romantic landscape painting to snow globes, from mountaineering to eco-disasters, and from touchscreen devices to DNA. Expertly written but accessible, Liquid Crystals recounts the unheralded but hugely significant emergence of this unique form of matter.
 

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 2, 2017

Reviews

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, captivated by its poetic language in examining the liquidity of animation and the crystallinity of motion. Surprised by the question of the definition of life and non-life provokes in this book. The inclusion of social darwinist zoologist Haeckel theory on soul and crystal is also fascinating. Mountain films, Ernst Bloch's paranoia of technology of perceiving, Marx's Gallertes - on liquefication and crystallisation of capital, Benjamin's Mickey Mouse, and Lehmann's idea of liquid crystal as the means of endless energy production (resonates to Russian Cosmism) are amongst other weird ideas touched by Leslie in relation liquid crystals. Apart from this Western canon, I wonder perhaps the theory of liquid crystal was also examined by Ibn Miskawayh.