What is the meaning of following line: in crystalline solids same physical property is found to be different along different direction
What is the meaning of following line: in crystalline solids same physical property is found to be different along different direction
This is really a mind-boggling question! It occurred to me when I first read the first page of first chapter - Solid States. I asked my teacher, he too did no have any proper answer. I could not find any answer until the day I was standing beside a glass window shop while I was waiting for a friend. The workers were fabricating a window-sized rectangular glass from a large rectangular sheet of glass. Suddenly one of the workers lost his balance and the whole glass fell on ground and was shattered instantaneously. There was lots of broken pieces of glass everywhere around.
And the answer dawned upon me. The rectangular sheet of glass represents a definite crystal structure. As its three lengths are different than each other, when you see it from different angle, it looks different. So other than cubic crystalline like NaCl, the other lattices are an anisotropic because they look different from different angle though they have a geometrical shape. Whereas the broken pieces of glass did not have regular geometrical structure, so they appeared same not matter from which way you look at them! So amorphous materials are isotropic in nature.
Hope helpful to you...
This is really a mind-boggling question! It occurred to me when I first read the first page of first chapter - Solid States. I asked my teacher, he too did no have any proper answer. I could not find any answer until the day I was standing beside a glass window shop while I was waiting for a friend. The workers were fabricating a window-sized rectangular glass from a large rectangular sheet of glass. Suddenly one of the workers lost his balance and the whole glass fell on ground and was shattered instantaneously. There was lots of broken pieces of glass everywhere around.
And the answer dawned upon me. The rectangular sheet of glass represents a definite crystal structure. As its three lengths are different than each other, when you see it from different angle, it looks different. So other than cubic crystalline like NaCl, the other lattices are an anisotropic because they look different from different angle though they have a geometrical shape. Whereas the broken pieces of glass did not have regular geometrical structure, so they appeared same not matter from which way you look at them! So amorphous materials are isotropic in nature.
Hope helpful to you...
