X-Ray Diffraction Quotes

My earlier exposure to physics certainly helped me in the use of biophysical techniques like crystallography, the use of computing, calculations, etc.

Crystallographers believed in X-ray results, which are of course very accurate. But the x-rays are limited, and electron microscopy filled the gap, and so the discovery of quasicrystals could have been discovered only by electron microscopy, and the community of crystallographers, for several years, was not willing to listen.

For X-rays, the phenomenon of diffraction by crystals was a natural consequence of the idea that X-rays are waves analogous to light and differ from it only by having a smaller wavelength.

Synchrotron light has revolutionized the field of protein crystallography. It has made it possible to look at much larger structures with much smaller crystals.

With crystals we are in a situation similar to an attempt to investigate an optical grating merely from the spectra it produces... But a knowledge of the positions and intensities of the spectra does not suffice for the determination of the structure. The phases with which the diffracted waves vibrate relative to one another enter in an essential way. To determine a crystal structure on the atomic scale, one must know the phase differences between the different interference spots on the photographic plate, and this task may certainly prove to be rather difficult.

The structure of many cellular macromolecules has been revealed at the atomic level using x-ray crystallography.

This discovery convinced me of the power of crystallography and led me to continue in this field.

The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.

I should not like to leave an impression that all structural problems can be settled by X-ray analysis or that all crystal structures are easy to solve. I seem to have spent much more of my life not solving structures than solving them.

I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, 'Concerning the Nature of Things.'

When X-rays traverse matter of any kind, this matter becomes a source of a radiation similar in character to that of the primary radiation falling upon it.

X-Ray crystallography is nowadays an accurate and rapid method of determining conformation in the crystal lattice, which conformation usually corresponds to the preferred conformation in solution.