The title of this post is a quote, of disputed origin. Its true. CERN is currently spending billions of euros and employing armies of supersmart people looking for the Higgs particle (as well as doing more fun and useful stuff too). The Higgs mechanism was stolen from condensed-matter physics by particle physicists, whose descendants are running CERN. There is no shame in stealing ideas from one area of physics and using them in another.

I was thinking of this today. I got referee reports on a review paper I have written. The review paper reviews other scientific papers on how crystals start to form. This is includes how calcium carbonate forms. Calcium carbonate forms a very common crystal called calcite, the White Cliffs of Dover (see picture above) are made of calcite. It is very easy to make calcite.

However, as I discovered when I reviewed the literature on how calcite forms, it is proving very difficult to work how calcite crystals start to form. Very difficult indeed. For my review, I spent hours reading maybe 20 papers on this. My conclusions: 1) It is probably complex, 2) I am now grumpy. We really know very little about this rather common process. You can make calcite in your kitchen if you want.

Maybe one way to proceed with this intractable problem is by stealing ideas from another field. There is evidence of clusters of calcium carbonate being present in solution before the calcite crystals appear. Now clusters have been studied in a very different context, the formation of rain droplets and snowflakes in our atmosphere. For rainfall these are called cloud condensation nuclei. It may be that we can learn from these water clusters and try to apply this to clusters of calcium and carbonate. It may not work of course, but that’s research.