I’ve been working on very tangible models of both solid spherical crystals of lignin nanotubules, as well as spherical liquid crystals of the same lignin nanotubules, when suspended in a suitable reagent. My latest animation of the coupled rotation of “A Liquid Crystal Sphere” depicts quantum pressure in action, where the motion on the surface of a spherical object is transferred through the whole volume of the object. While I’ve talked about the differences between solids an

In my previous post I presented the general model of cylindrical crystals rotating within a confined lattice. However, without prior knowledge of what I’ve been working on, the model doesn’t really convey too well how this rotation looks like in a crystallite. So, in today’s post I take the model I used in the “Collapsing a Cylinder-Sphere” and “The Trypolite Crystal” posts and make the cylinders rotate. The major practical difference is that the models in my previous posts

I started my blog a bit over four years ago with a post “And Yet it Rotates”. In it I described my first guess at a supramolecular orbital, or a very complex trajectory for the confined closed-loop motion of molecules. While I still definitely believe that molecules mostly move in more-or-less closed-loop orbitals, even when gaseous or liquid, the model that I presented probably isn’t the correct one. Or if it is correct sometimes, it probably doesn’t describe the most common