Chapter 1. Section 6.
Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls.
A celebrated film star 'places four quartz crystal clusters in the four
corners of her bathtub every time she takes a bath'. This doubtless has
some mystic connection with the following recipe for meditation.
Each of the four quartz crystals in the meditation room should be 'programmed'
to project gentle, loving, relaxing, crystalline energy towards all those present
within the Meditation group. The quartz crystals will then generate a field of
positive crystalline energy surrounding everyone in the room.
Language like this is a con-trick. It sounds 'scientific' enough to
bamboozle the innocent. 'Programming' is what you do to computers.
The word means nothing when applied to crystals. 'Energy' and 'field'
are carefully defined notions in physics. There is no such thing as
'loving' or 'crystalline' energy, whether positive or no.*
New Age lore also advises placing a quartz crystal in your water jug.
'You will soon appreciate the sparkling purity of your crystal water.' See
how the trick works. Somebody with no understanding of the real
world could make a kind of 'poetic' association with 'crystal clear'
water. But that is no more sensible than trying to read by the light of a
('bright as a') button. Or putting ('hard as') nails under your pillow to
assist an erection.
Try the following experiment when you next suffer from 'flu': hold your personal
quartz crystal and visualize yellow light radiating through it. Then place your
crystal in a jug of water and drink this water the next day; one cup of water at
two-hourly intervals. You will be amazed at the result!
Drinking water at two-hourly intervals is a good idea anyway, when you
have flu. Putting a quartz crystal in it will have no additional effect. In
*And, by the way, the next time you visit an 'alternative' therapist who claims to be 'balancing
your energy fields', challenge them to say what they mean. The answer will be absolutely
nothing.
particular, no amount of 'visualizing' of coloured light will change the
composition of either the crystal or the water.
Pseudoscientific drivel like this is a disturbingly prominent part of the
culture of our age. I have limited my examples to crystals because I had
to draw a line somewhere. But 'star signs' would have done just as well.
Or 'angels', 'channelling', 'telepathy', 'quantum healing', 'homeopathy',
'map-dowsing'. There is no obvious limit to human gullibility. We are
docile credulity-cows, eager victims of quacks and charlatans who milk
us and grow fat. There is a rich living to be made by anyone prepared
to prostitute the language - and the wonder - of science.
But isn't it all - crystal ball gazing, star signs, birth stones, ley-lines
and the rest - just a bit of harmless fun? If people want to believe in
garbage like astrology, or crystal healing, why not let them? But it's so
sad to think about all that they are missing. There is so much wonder in
real science. The universe is mysterious enough to need no help from
warlocks, shamans and 'psychic' tricksters. These are at best a soulsapping
distraction. At worst they are dangerous profiteers.
The real world, properly understood in the scientific way, is deeply
beautiful and unfailingly interesting. It's worth putting in some honest
effort to understand it properly, undistracted by false wonder and
prostituted pseudoscience. For illustration, we need look no farther
than crystals themselves.
In a crystal such as quartz or diamond the atoms are arranged in a
precisely repeating pattern. The atoms in a diamond - all identical
carbon atoms - are arrayed like soldiers on parade except that the
precision of their dressing far outsmarts the best-drilled guards
regiment, and the atomic soldiers outnumber all the people that have
ever lived or ever will. Imagine yourself shrunk to become one of the
carbon atoms in the heart of a diamond crystal. You are one of the
soldiers in a gigantic parade, but it'll seem a little odd because the files
are arrayed in three dimensions. Perhaps a prodigious school of fish is a
better image.
Each fish in the school is one carbon atom. Think of them hovering
in space, keeping their distance from each other and holding their
precise angles, by means of forces that you can't see but which scientists
fully understand. But if this is a fish school, it is one that - to scale -
would fill the Pacific Ocean. In any decent-sized diamond, you are likely
to be looking along arrays of atoms numbering hundreds of millions in
any one straight line.
Carbon atoms can take up other crystal lattice formations. To revert
to the military analogy, they can adopt alternative drill conventions.
Graphite (the 'lead' in pencils) is also carbon, but it's obviously nothing
like diamond. In graphite, the atoms form sheets of hexagons, like
chicken wire. Each sheet is loosely bonded to those above and below it,
and when impurities are present the sheets slide easily against each
other, which is why graphite is a good lubricant. Diamond is very much
not a lubricant. Its legendary hardness abrades the toughest materials.
The atoms in soft graphite and hard diamond are identical. If you could
persuade the atoms in graphite crystals to adopt the drill rules of
diamond crystals, you'd be rich. It can be done, but you need colossal
pressures and high temperatures, presumably the conditions that
naturally manufacture diamonds, deep in the earth.
If hexagons make a sheet of flat graphite, you can imagine that
interspersing some pentagons among the hexagons could make the
sheet buckle into a curve. Place exactly 12 pentagons strategically
among 20 hexagons and the curve bends round into a complete sphere.
Geometers call it a truncated icosahedron. This is exactly the pattern of
the sewing seams on a football. The football is, therefore, theoretically
a pattern into which carbon atoms might spontaneously fall.
Mirabile dictu, exactly this pattern has been discovered among carbon
atoms. The team responsible, including Sir Harry Kroto of Sussex
University, won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Called
Buckminsterfullerene, it is an elegant sphere of 60 carbon atoms, linked
up as 20 hexagons interspersed with 12 pentagons. The name honours
the visionary American architect Buckminster Fuller (whom I was
privileged to meet when he was a very old man*) and the spheres are
affectionately known as buckyballs. They can combine together to
make larger crystals. Like graphite sheets, buckyballs make good
lubricants, probably because of their spherical shape: they presumably
work like tiny ball bearings.
Since the buckyball's discovery, chemists have realized that it is just a
special case of a large family of 'buckytubes' and other 'fullerenes'.
Carbon atoms can theoretically join up to form an Aladdin's cave of
fascinating crystalline forms - another aspect of the unique property
that qualifies carbon to be the fundamental element of life.
Not every atom has carbon's talent for joining copies of itself. Other
crystals contain more than one kind of 'soldier', alternating in some
elegant pattern. In quartz crystals it is silicon and oxygen instead of
carbon; in common salt it is electrically charged atoms of sodium and
chlorine. Crystals naturally break along lines that betray the underlying
*He was billed to give us a short lecture but, unscripted, he held us spellbound for three
hours.
regimental drill pattern. That is why salt crystals are square, why the
honeycomb columns of the Giant's Causeway stand as they do, and
why diamond crystals are, well, diamond-shaped.
All crystals 'self-assemble' under locally acting rules. Their component
'soldiers', floating in free solution in water, spontaneously plug
themselves into 'gaps' on the surface of the existing crystal, where they
exactly fit. So a crystal may grow in solution from a tiny 'seed' - perhaps
an impurity like the sand grain at the heart of a pearl. There is no grand
design of buckyballs, quartz crystals, diamonds or anything else. This
principle of self-assembly runs right through living structure, too. DNA
itself (the genetic molecule, the molecule at the centre of all life) can be
regarded as a long, spiral crystal in which one half of the double helix
self-assembles on a template provided by the other. Viruses self-assemble
like elaborately complex crystal-clusters. The head of the T4 bacteriophage
(a virus that infects bacteria) actually looks like a single crystal.
Go into any museum and look at the collection of minerals. Even go
into a New Age shop and look at the crystals on display, along with all
the other apparatus of mumbo-jumbo and kitsch con-trickery. The
crystals won't respond to your attempts to 'program' them for
meditation, or 'dedicate' them with warm, loving thoughts. They won't
cure you of anything, or fill the room with 'inner peace' or 'psychic
energy'. But many of them are very beautiful, and it surely only adds to
the beauty when we understand that the shapes of the crystals, the
angles of their facets, the rainbow colours that flash from inside them,
all have a precise explanation which lies deep in the patterns of atomic
lattice-work.
Crystals don't vibrate with mystical, loving energy. But they do, in a
much stricter and more interesting sense, vibrate. Some crystals have an
electric charge across them, which changes when you physically deform
the crystal. This 'piezo-electric' effect, discovered in 1880 by the Curie
brothers (Marie's husband and his brother), is used in the styluses of
record players (the 'deforming' is done by the groove of the turning
record) and in some microphones (the deforming is done by sound
waves in the air). The piezo effect works in reverse. When a suitable
crystal is placed in an electric field it deforms itself rhythmically. Often
the timing of this oscillation is extremely accurate. It serves as the
equivalent of the pendulum or balance wheel in a quartz watch.
Let me tell you one last thing about crystals, and it may be the most
fascinating of all. The military metaphor makes us think of each soldier
as a metre or two from his neighbours. But actually almost all the interior
of a crystal is empty space. My head is 18 centimetres in diameter. To
keep to scale, my nearest neighbours in the crystalline parade would
have to be standing more than a kilometre away. No wonder the tiny
particles called neutrinos (even smaller than electrons) pass right
through the earth and come out the other side as if it wasn't there.
But if solid things are mostly empty space, why don't we see them as
empty space? Why does a diamond feel hard and solid instead of
crumbly and full of holes? The answer lies in our own evolution. Our
sense organs, like all our bits, have been shaped by Darwinian natural
selection over countless generations. You might think that our sense
organs would be shaped to give us a 'true' picture of the world as it
'really' is. It is safer to assume that they have been shaped to give us a
useful picture of the world, to help us to survive. In a way, what sense
organs do is assist our brains to construct a useful model of the world,
and it is this model that we move around in. It is a kind of 'virtual
reality' simulation of the real world. Neutrinos can pass straight through
a rock but we can't. If we try to, we hurt ourselves. When constructing
its simulation of rock, the brain therefore represents it as hard and solid.
It's almost as though our sense organs are telling us: 'You can't get
through objects of this kind.' That's what 'solid' means. That's why we
perceive them as 'solid'.
In the same way we find much of the universe, as science discovers it,
difficult to understand. Einstein's relativity, quantum uncertainty, black
holes, the big bang, the expanding universe, the vast slow movement
of geological time - all these are hard to grasp. No wonder science
frightens some people. But science can even explain why these things
are hard to understand, and why the effort frightens us. We are jumpedup
apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane
details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.
These are deep matters, and a short article is not the place to go into
them. I shall have succeeded if I have persuaded you that a scientific
approach to crystals is more illuminating, more uplifting, and also
stranger, than anything imagined in the wildest dreams of New Age
gurus or paranormal preachers. The blunt truth is that the dreams and
visions of gurus and preachers are not nearly wild enough. By scientific
standards, that is.
sigebryht