Concepts that are ancient and pervasive do not lend themselves easily to precise definition. A layperson might think of 'crystal' as referring to table glass of high quality. But to a scientist, 'crystal' denotes solid matter in a more or less ordered form, whereas glass is considerably less ordered than a truly crystalline substance. Yet the Spanish, for example, have only one word (cristal) for both 'glass' and 'crystal'. The dictionary definition of crystal is clinical, referring to "forms assumed by substances with a definite internal structure and external shape of symmetrically arranged plane surfaces". But the idea that crystals are cold and static has persisted since the time of ancient Greece ― the term crystallos ('ice' or 'quartz') evolved from cryos ('cold') and halas ('salt'). As recently as the mid-1900s, the Nobel prizewinner Leopold Ruzicka dismissed crystals as "chemical cemeteries". Crystals were dead and so no chemistry could take place within them.
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