From simple liquids to colloids and soft matter

Abstract

In 1977 Victor Weisskopf published an essay entitled About liquids, in which he argued that the existence of liquids is not at all self-evident: They belong to the Who ordered that? category.1 Assume that a group of intelligent theoretical physicists had lived in closed buildings from birth such that they never had occasion to see any natural structures, wrote Weisskopf. They probably would predict the existence of atoms, of molecules, of solid crystals, both metals and insulators, of gases, but most likely not the existence of liquids.