Symmetry with that Glass of Emulsion: Yummy

Now, we have seen the symmetry of the aforementioned quasicrystals and we see the beauty. But we need to understand symmetry and its impact at home, at the breakfast table. You sit down (not that hungry, people are not usually very hungry when they wake up in the morning) at the breakfast table to do just that, to break your fast. You sit down to have a nice glass of emulsion with a pancake that has some of that sweet solid emulsion sitting right on top. Sounds pretty friggen disgusting? Strange how this is so intricately involved with the stark beauty of symmetry.

These are colloidal properties. Colloids are not quite heterogeneous and not quite homogenous. In terms of size, colloids meets the two types of mixtures in the middle at 1.0 x 10^-6. "Suspension of colloidal particles have been widely employed as model systems to study" phase changes. Now when measuring and studying this, spherical pictures of atoms and molecules are always used. Other shapes likes rods have been used as models but for very specific research purposes. It is well known that spheres do not account for the vast array of molecule shape and size. What people need to do is synthesize some of these micro particles. This has been done to some degree. Great minds at Yale University, Jin-Gyu Park,Jason D. Forster, and Eric R. Dufresne, have synthesized colloidal water. These are polymer particles with the same imitated symmetry as water molecules for the purposes of the study and research of condensed matter. 

Figure 1

Figure 2

Multistep polymerization is used. Take a quick peep above this text (Figure 1) and you will get the picture. The spherical micrometer sized colloids are swelled with a monomer solution. It is heated and this drives separation of the monomers (the solvent). Seeded polymerization is what is used. The results were seen under a scanning electron microscope (Figure 2). This is a genuine synthesis of chemical symmetry, all utilizing the lexicon of solutions. A symmetrical molecule, water, has been created using colloidal micro-molecules. This can be expanded beyond the domain of simple molecules like water, for sure. These colloidal properties, using seeded polymerization as the medium, can yield results, results that show that symmetry can be created, artificially, in the solutions market place.