So before I go into some really interesting stuff, and by interesting stuff I mean stuff that has to do with liquid crystals, I thought I’d take a moment to cover a little bit of ground on photovoltaics.

Now while I am going to be talking about photovoltaics, I’m going to make the caveats:

1) I’m a chemist, not a physicist.  More ( Read more... )

Recently, in passing, someone mentioned the LCD.  As it turns out, they got the explanation for how it works somewhat right.  Somewhat.

It’s not his fault, he’s not an engineer or a device physicist, but I thought I’d take the time to bang out a quick tangential post about how liquid crystals actually do that thing that they do in your LCDs.  ( Read more... )

            Hopefully this short spiel on liquid crystals gets expanded at some point, beyond just a short introduction to liquid crystals.  I’m horrible at remembering this sort of thing, but I think that this is a topic that is important and also interesting - not because I am a Ph.D. scientist that works with this “stuff,” but because this is a ( Read more... )