Icons of nature’s design

Originally published 15 February 1988

They are “the cos­mi­cal­ly charged cor­ner­stones upon which the great pyra­mids of Egypt were built.” They are “nat­ur­al super­con­duc­tors through which a uni­verse of enlight­en­ment passed to the lost con­ti­nent of Atlantis.” They are crys­tals, and if you know how to use them they can make you healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Or so believe a grow­ing num­ber of New Age peo­ple, who use crys­tals in every aspect of their dai­ly lives, often with horo­scopes, herbs, incense, and elixirs. Beryl, for exam­ple, relieves stress. Dia­mond guards against envy. Azu­rite height­ens dreams. Gar­net improves self-esteem. And good old white quartz is an ener­giz­er, chan­nel­ing into your envi­ron­ment the very best of cos­mic vibrations.

Book­stores are full of crys­tal self-help books, or you can pay $75 an hour to vis­it a crys­tal con­sul­tant. We knew crys­tals had made it big when a few months ago they appeared on the cov­er of Time, in the hands of New Age guru Shirley MacLaine.

Now it so hap­pens that I have on my desk a clus­ter of quartz crys­tals almost iden­ti­cal to those on the Time cov­er. And, as a mat­ter of fact, a num­ber of good things began hap­pen­ing in my life at about the time I got the crystals.

Have I become a New Age believer?

The delight of patterns

Stephen Jay Gould once wrote that “the human mind delights in find­ing pat­tern — so much so that we often mis­take coincidence…for pro­found mean­ing.” Sci­ence is one high­ly suc­cess­ful appa­ra­tus for win­now­ing the wheat of pro­found mean­ing from the chaff of coin­ci­dence. And in the mat­ter of crys­tals, I’ll stick with science.

The coin­ci­dence between my crys­tals and my good for­tune was just that — coin­ci­dence. Yet the crys­tals are on my desk for a pro­found rea­son, and the rea­son is delight in pattern.

Crys­tals are win­dows on the world of atoms. Per­haps bet­ter than any­thing else in our nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment they exem­pli­fy the pat­terns of order that are built into nature on the atom­ic scale.

The quan­ti­ta­tive sci­ence of crys­tals began in the 17th cen­tu­ry when the Dan­ish nat­ur­al philoso­pher Nico­las Steno noticed that the faces of quartz crys­tals always meet at the same angle. No mat­ter how big or small the crys­tal, or its shape, or its place of ori­gin, the angles are the same.

While I was writ­ing this piece, I put my clus­ter of quartz crys­tals under a micro­scope and entered a world of spec­tac­u­lar archi­tec­tur­al forms — gor­geous, icy-smooth planes col­lid­ing this way and that to form a space-age city of tow­er­ing pil­lars and plung­ing chasms. And at every edge, Steno’s unvary­ing angle of 120 degrees. A hint of con­stan­cy in the midst of chaos.

In the late 18th cen­tu­ry, the min­er­al­o­gist René Just Haüy made anoth­er remark­able dis­cov­ery about the nature of crys­tals. Accord­ing to the sto­ry, Haüy was exam­in­ing a large cal­cite crys­tal in the home of a friend when he dropped it. To his embar­rass­ment, it shat­tered. When he stooped to pick up the pieces he noticed that every frag­ment, large and small, had the same basic shape as the orig­i­nal crys­tal. “Tout est trou­vé!”, shout­ed Haüy — “All is discovered!”

Hauy rushed back to his lab and smashed a cal­cite crys­tal into tiny bits, and every piece resem­bled the par­ent. He rea­soned the the small­est units of the crys­tal — per­haps even on the atom­ic scale — would have the same shape.

Lovely imperfections

In the 20th cen­tu­ry, X‑rays con­firmed Haüy’s con­clu­sion. The shape of a crys­tal is deter­mined by the way atoms of that sub­stance bind togeth­er to form “lat­tices” — repeat­ing arrays of space-fill­ing atom­ic units. In all of nature there are only a few class­es of fun­da­men­tal crys­tal shapes, and these can be pre­dict­ed math­e­mat­i­cal­ly. Yet no two crys­tals are exact­ly alike, and that too is part of their attraction.

Tiny traces of impu­ri­ties add col­or to crys­tals — emer­ald, sap­phire, ruby, aqua­ma­rine. Pure quartz is clear; the amethyst col­or of my quartz clus­ter prob­a­bly derives from tiny traces of iron, and this depar­ture from per­fec­tion enhances the beau­ty and val­ue of the crystals.

Under the micro­scope my appar­ent­ly reg­u­lar quartz crys­tals become a show­case of imper­fec­tions — col­or vari­a­tions, stri­a­tions, cracks, and inclu­sions, includ­ing some won­der­ful “star­burst” crys­tals of goethite (if my guess is right) embed­ded with­in the quartz — pat­terns with­in pattern.

All of this beau­ty hints at things still beyond the crys­tal­lo­g­ra­pher’s ken. Most mys­te­ri­ous of all is the rid­dle of crys­tal growth. If crys­tals grow by adding atoms at the sur­face, and if atoms fall into place essen­tial­ly at ran­dom, then why aren’t those shim­mer­ing sur­faces that I see in my micro­scope bumpier?

And con­sid­er the per­fect sym­me­try of the snowflake? How do atoms attach­ing them­selves at one tip of the grow­ing six-sided crys­tal know what’s hap­pen­ing at anoth­er tip? The answer may have some­thing to do with vibra­tions with­in the crys­tal, vibra­tions of exquis­ite sen­si­tiv­i­ty that main­tain a del­i­cate — dare I say cos­mic — bal­ance between order and disorder.

Are the crys­tals on my desk chan­nel­ing those cos­mic vibra­tions into my per­son­al life? I think not. Crys­tals are delight­ful icons of design in nature, but the New Age wheat of pro­found mean­ing is my chaff of coincidence.