Liquid crystals and morphogenesis

Abstract

At first sight, the idea of a single state of matter that is crystalline and liquid at the same time appears hard to accept, as many physicists, including Nernst himself, pointed out when the first liquid crystals were discovered more than a century ago [38]. In quite another style, Salvador Dali's melting watches, although meticulously represented, had even more incredible deformations. Dali made a work of art out of a provocation, and without really fooling the viewers, he encourages them to wander through the outer fringes of their unconscious. Dali probably did not know much about liquid crystals, but he knew that life has its own clock mechanisms, with other subtleties coming into play within a matter that is rigid here, flexible there, soft elsewhere, and liquid on other levels, all of which does not prevent the system from functioning. Quite the contrary. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.