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everyday life. In this intense and quasi-fluid state, saintly priests slip seamlessly into
sexual predation; an ecstatic Jewish Orthodox fundamentalist shoots 29 praying
Moslems in a cave near Abraham’s burial plot for Sarah in Hebron; what were
lovingly mystical, Jelaluddin Rumi’s Afghanistan (Balkh) descendents become
people bashing and women stoning morality police; committed and mesmerizing
Christian televangelists attend peep shows and seek child pornography; devoted
Islamists crash airplanes into tall New York buildings.
In the physics of condensed matter, two common forms of multi-molecular or
polyatomic cooperative arrangements are the crystalline condition and in some
ways its opposite, the amorphous glassy state that results from rapid cooling
through a melting temperature. The microscopic atomic arrangement in glasses, in
contrast with the crystalline state, exhibits no spatial periodicity or long-range order.
In contrast with fluids, the friction of passage of molecular elements of glasses past
each other, their shear viscosity, is large enough such that their macroscopic
shapes are maintained in the very slow flow for very long times. In-between the
crystalline and glassy states their exists a multiplicity of possible unstable
arrangements which result from what physicists call frustration, the inability of a
system to find a unique, lowest energy, ground state. The generic example of a
ferromagnetic crystal has two types of ordering principles: (1) The mutual alignment
of the atomic magnetic moments, visualizable as the lining up of dipole, positive to
negative, magnetic arrows; (2) The geometric crystalline low energy ground state
described above.
When the symmetry of these two ordering principles are incompatible,
imagine an arrangement of neighboring atoms that prefer anti-alignment of the
magnetic moments which are placed on a geometrically triangular rather than a
square lattice, there is no single arrangement that can satisfy both magnetic and
geometric principles. What emerges in this state of frustration is the potential for a
multiplicity of nearly equal energy states. Water has the potential for both geometric
ice crystal symmetry as well as arrangements of hydrogen proton (+) to oxygen
electron (-) magnetic moments (with well-ordered oxygen lattices but disorder
among the hydrogen positions). It is therefore not surprising that a multiplicity of
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