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In a week in which the Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to Peter Higgs and François Englert for predicting the existence of a mass-giving particle that cannot be seen and so needed to be detected indirectly, it is nice to be able to announce the release of a short film that celebrates the 100th anniversary of a similar achievement.
In 1913 the father and son laureates-to-be, William and Lawrence Bragg, building on earlier observations by a team led by Max Von Laue, turned the penetrating power of x-rays onto crystalline forms of matter such as humble table salt and not-so-humble diamond and realised that they could interpret the strangely regular ways in which the beam was deflected to work out how the atoms within the crystal are arranged. For the first time, the atomic structure of matter could be "seen" and for this achievement the Braggs were awarded the physics Nobel prize in 1915; (Laue had been honoured the previous year for discovering the phenomenon of x-ray diffraction by crystals).
Why does this matter? Because since those first experiments x-ray crystallography has been used to analyse ever more complex structures, not just forms of matter that are naturally crystalline but anything that can be induced to crystallise. This includes all manner of chemical compounds – from benzene to penicillin to vitamins – and large biological molecules or complexes, such as proteins and DNA and even whole viruses. Today's Chemistry Nobel award to Karplus, Levitt and Warshel is a further testament to the power of crystallography; their chemical calculations are entirely dependent on knowing the structures of the molecules being analysed and in many cases these will have been determined by x-ray methods.
To get a better idea of the rise and significance of x-ray crystallography, have a look at the short animated film above. It was made by 12foot6 for the Royal Institution (RI) as part of a project funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council to celebrate the centenary of the technique. I have been helping out a little on this project and was pleased to be able to advise on the script and to have the chance to do the voiceover.
If three minutes isn't enough and you find yourself yearning to know more, I will be aiming to explain exactly how the technique works and what it has told us in a Friday Evening Discourse titled "Seeing things in a different light: how x-ray crystallography revealed the structure of everything" at the RI on Friday 25th October. It would be lovely to see you there.
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