Abstract
I love this micrograph. I could stare at its beautiful blue colors and cellular microstructure all day long. It’s a bit abstract, isn’t it?
There’s that word again. What a curious word, abstract is. It’s a noun, an adjective, and a verb.
The Adjective
There’s the Jackson Pollock kind of abstract - art. It’s hard to describe, right? Abstract art is amorphous. It is lacks form. Abstract art lacks long range order - it’s structure is chaotic. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Things that are abstract, like art, exist in thought, they’re confusing. When we can’t understand something, art or otherwise, we refer to it as abstract. You might see something in abstract art, but you just can’t quite put your finger on it. Abstract art invokes our ability to see things that are not physically there.
To be abstract is to be detached from the physical, the orderly, the tangible.
Drip painting by Jackson Pollock
The Noun
If you’re familiar with academic papers, then you’ll know about abstract, the noun. It’s like a 2 paragraph summarization. An abstract sits at the top of the entire article and provides a high-level summary of all the major points. The primary goal of it’s author is to persuade the reader into taking the time to read the rest of the paper. They’re the next stop after the title on the research train. They’re detailed and brief enough to determine if the contents of the paper are relevant to what you’re looking for. My research often stops at abstracts.
So if academic abstracts are so predictably ordered at the top of the page, why are they even called abstracts? Abstractions are supposed to be disordered and intangible, right?
An abstract is an extract, a distillation.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/sic.2010.55.3.204 Bet you wanna read the rest of this paper on how materials science can be used to detect fraudulent art-work! Well, that’s how they get ya. First one’s free. Gotta pay for the rest! You might be able to find a free pdf if you’re diligent.
The Verb
While I might call getting your teeth pulled tooth extraction, you could just as easily call it abstraction. While abstraction is usually used for ideas and extraction for physical objects, their overlap of use cases is undeniable. If I said tooth abstraction in a conversation about dentistry, would you correct me? Would you even hear the difference, or would your brain drive right over that small technical detail?
To abstract is to extract.
It’s All Coming Together
Abstract is a derivative of the Latin word Abstractus - meaning to draw away, to detach. Like teeth from mouths, ideas can be detached from reality. Ideas aren’t restricted by the tangible.
To summarize an academic paper is to abstract the major points, cutting out the “fluff”. Similarly, abstract art removes the details and presents a distilled essence through shapes, colors, and forms detached from specific representations. Both processes strip away the extraneous to reveal the core.
The meaning, spelling, and (probably) pronunciation of abstract has not drifted since the days of the Romans, over 2 millennia. That’s pretty cool.
This shared concept of detachment underscores the durability of the word "abstract," connecting the realms of art and science, two sides of the same coin. Salt and pepper. Yin and Yang.
It’s abstraction that allows us to read between the lines, that bridges real and imaginary, body and mind.
Etymology
Etymology is cool. One of my English teachers was really into etymology. The impact of those lesson was not lost on me and I love doing my own deep dives into etymological rabbit holes. These adventures often lead to interesting findings about human history.
Have you ever said or written a word so many times it stops looking like a word anymore? You can’t tell if it’s real or something you just made up? Well, they’re all made up! Somebody, somewhere, sometime named a thing- a thing.
Sometimes that name of a thing sticks and sometimes it drifts drastically over time. If you can trace a word back to its roots, you can see the effects of wars, human migration, the movement of geopolitical lines, natural disasters, technological changes, and the passage of time.
For example, "broadcast" originally referred to scattering seeds widely in farming. Over time, it came to mean transmitting radio or television signals widely. This shared root of spreading something broadly explains its multiple applications.
Materials
While the etymology portion of this post isn’t my forte and a bit out of my cozy materials comfort zone, I did sneak in a materials word up there. Did you catch it?
Amorphous was born across the Adriatic Sea from abstract - it has more of an Aegean vibe. It’s a Greek word, amorphos (no u). The prefix and root being a- and -morphē, respectively, meaning without shape, without form.
In materials, amorphous is contrary to crystalline - meaning ordered, repeating, and latticed. To be amorphous is to be chaotic, to lack long range order, to lack structure. Amorphism is not a form, because it has no form. It’s a bit abstract.
An everyday amorphous material is glass. Glass is amorphous silicon dioxide, SiO2, or “silica”. Quartz is what we call crystalline SiO2.
Have you ever seen a big “crystal?” Those cool looking rocks that are optically clear/translucent? Those crystals that you find in museums and collections are crystals, not in the hocus pocus sense, in the materials science sense. They are special because they are single crystals.
Clear Crystal Quartz | Lilly Pad Village Gem Mining This article starts strong, but quickly descends into hocus-pocus. Crystals do not have auras, healing powers, or provide balance. That’s mumbo-jumbo. The value of scientific communication is being able to distinguish the real from the imaginary. Though, if any rock had special powers, it’d probably be this one.
Regular old rocks are usually polycrystalline. Those aren’t nearly as cool as single crystals. Nobody wants the rock hiding your spare key. Dr. Smith Sonian ain’t calling.
If you read my previous blog on grains, you’d know that grains are crystals. Most metals you’re familiar with are also polycrystalline, like rocks. They have many crystals.
Grains, specifically their boundaries, have an important role in opacity (optical clarity). Glass is an optically clear amorphous solid, it doesn’t have crystals - it doesn’t have grains, it doesn’t have grain boundaries.
A big museum-quality quartz crystal is optically clear because it’s a single crystal, it doesn’t have grain boundaries.
Metals and rocks are opaque. They are polycrystalline. They have many grains and grain boundaries.
There are many factors at play that determine if a material is transparent to visible light. We won’t get into all that but I’d be doing a disservice to my fellow materials nerds if I didn’t disclaimer this. For silica, grain boundaries are definitely in play.
Free electrons matter too, fellow nerd, I know… It’s ok… Let’s leave it for another day. You’re not going to win favorite Christmas party guest bringing up free electrons.
BTW, before I forget, you can distinguish a materials scientist from a chemist in the wild by what they call SiO2. Materials scientists generally prefer to drop the -on dioxide and replace it with an -a “SIL-IC—a”. A-LUM-IN-A (Al2O3, as opposed to alumin-um trioxide). There are exceptions, of course. Iron (II) Trioxide is rust. I’ve never heard anyone call carbon dioxide carbia, or carbonia. But we’re solids people, we leave the gases to the real nerds - chemists.
One of the hardest parts of breaking into a new expertise is the technicalities and intricacies of jargon.
