colloids

One of the things I love about colloids is just how visual they are. Be it watching them jiggling around under a confocal microscope, or the beautiful TEM images of crystal structures, I always find them quite inspirational, or at least instructional, for better understanding statistical mechanics. Sedimentation Just to prove I’m on the cutting edge of science, I recently discovered another neat example from 1993. At the liquid matter conference in Vienna Roberto Piazza gave a talk titled “The unbearable heaviness of colloids”....

All being good it looks like I’ve secured employment for a tiny while longer. Hooray! The place I’m moving to is a big place for synthetic colloids, so it seems like a good time to go through what I know about colloids. If nothing else it’ll be interesting to compare this to what I’ll know in a year’s time! So, here is a theorists perspective on colloid science. I’ll spare the usual introduction about how colloids are ubiquitous in nature, you can go to Wikipedia for that....