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H. Aoki, Y. Syono and R.J. Hemley (Eds) Physics Meets Mineralogy.

Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) 2000, xviii + 397 pp. Price £65.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 521 64342 2

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This book has a great title. It reflects the important impact that physics has had on mineral sciences over many years, and which continues to develop. Not only does the international mineral sciences community now exploit many experimental and theoretical tools that were originally developed within the physics community for the study of mineral behaviour and properties, but the field of mineral sciences has had great success in attracting physicists, as well as chemists and others across the physical sciences, who are struck by the intellectual fertility to be found in the study of minerals. The list of experimental techniques that have crossed over from physics is surprisingly long. As well as X-ray and electron diffraction techniques, there is a range of diffraction and spectroscopic tools using neutron and synchrotron radiation, IR and Raman spectroscopy, NMR, surface probes such as STM and AFM, as well as methods to measure thermodynamic and elastic properties, all developed for studies as functions of temperature and/or pressure. There is an equally impressive list of theoretical and computational tools that have crossed into mineral sciences from physics and chemistry, particularly ab initio electronic structure calculations, but also semi-empirical and empirical modelling methods, statistical mechanics methods for studying disorder (such as CVM and Monte Carlo methods), symmetry analysis, theories of displacive phase transitions, and theories for strain-induced mesoscopic ordering. Moreover, neither of these lists is exhaustive, but the examples I have given show that the meeting of physics (and other physical sciences) with mineral sciences is extremely rich. It is within this spirit that the book aims to give, citing the back cover, ‘a state-of-the-art description of the interaction between geosciences and condensed-matter . . . [Full Text of this Article]