Soft Order in Physical Systems

Front Cover
R. Bruinsma, Y. Rabin
Springer Science & Business Media, Dec 6, 2012 - Science - 236 pages
A humoristic view of the physics of soft matter, which nevertheless has a ring of truth to it, is that it is an ill-defined subject which deals with ill-condensed matter by ill-defined methods. Although, since the Nobel prize was awarded to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, this subject can be no longer shrugged-away as "sludge physics" by the physics community, it is still not viewed universally as "main stream" physics. While, at first glance, this may be considered as another example of inertia, a case of the "establishment" against the "newcomer", the roots of this prejudice are much deeper and can be traced back to Roger Bacon's conception about the objectivity of science. All of us would agree with the weaker form of this idea which simply says that the final results of our work should be phrased in an observer-independent way and be communicable to anybody who made the effort to learn this language. There exists, however, a stronger form of this idea according to which the above criteria of "objectivity" and "communicability" apply also to the process of scientific inquiry. The fact that major progress in the physics of soft matter was made in apparent violation of this approach, by applying intuition to problems which appeared to defy rigorous analysis, may explain why many physicists feel somewhat ill-at-ease with this subject.

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Contents

An Historical Perspective Une Perspective Historique
1
An Introduction
33
The Adhesion Between Elastomers
57
Dynamics of Late Stage Phase Separation in Polymer Blends
73
RESEARCH PAPERS
99
The Revealing of Heterogeneities by Free Linear Chains in a Network
113
NonDebye Screening in Polyelectrolyte Solutions
117
Entropy of Knots and Statistics of Entangled Random Walks
125
Soft Atomic Potentials and LowFrequency Raman Scattering in Glasses
151
Percolation Diffusion and Fractons
159
Diffusion Reaction A+B C with A and B InitiallySeparated
167
Fractons in Computer and Laboratory Experiments
185
Permeability of a Soap Film
195
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
203
NeoDarwinian Processes in the Evolution of Science and
223
Index
229

Wetting from Mixtures of Flexible Chains
133
Dynamics of Disordered Systems Glasses
141

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