Agricolaite

07-22

Posted on by Jean Constant

07-22. Agricolaite #7.

Quite a week!

From a board game to a symphony for a soliton, an atomic electrical storm and now a fractal build up, this little mineral is an endless source of inspiration!

This visualization is from the very same resource I used the first day of the week. I didn’t have any real thought plan using the same 3 resources alternately throughout the week.  Now, I’m glad I did. From a quiet dreamscape to an busy fractal-like system, Nature encapsulates a lot of information in the minuscule geometry of the agricolaite crystal.

Original resource: Anderson, Chieh, Irish and Tong.

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07-21

Posted on by Jean Constant

07-21. Agricolaite #6.

A board game!

Games agricolaites play: how do you extract the center atom without breaking any line? A possible answer – bring in more atoms like in the right-side structure?

I also inserted a new element – the “free” atom is actually a picture of planet Europa I found on RobertLovesPI blog page. Great picture! Now the new symbolic could be – when nano-scale agricolaite atoms break free, they reconstitute as a full-size planet in the sky. Quite a poetic journey indeed!

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07-20

Posted on by Jean Constant

07-20. Agricolaite #5.

I’m not sure why – I had to introduce a soliton in this image. Nothing to do with the Agricolaite geometry, but somewhere the mirrored triangles & spheres remind me of this strange self-contained mathematical sound wave. A musical mineral? Why not!

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07-19

Posted on by Jean Constant

07-19. Agricolaite #4.

“Bohemian pachinko” – study for a virtual 3D gallery exhibit piece.

From a resource by Anderson, Chieh, Irish and Tong. Incidentally, I used the same resource template I used on 07/16. Two versions of the same info with a 3-days hiatus.

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07-18

Posted on by Jean Constant

07-18. Agricolaite #3.

What to do with so many atoms flying at your screen? Let them be I guess.

I noticed it before – the smaller the crystal, the more atoms in its structure. And of course like in every overpacked structure, it creates a stressed-out geometry and a huge array of vertices crisscrossing and overlapping each other. Hard to make sense of it all.

From a resource by Skala, Ondrus, Veselovsky, Cisarova, and Hlousek.

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07-16

Posted on by Jean Constant

07-16. Agricolaite #1.

To stay with minerals named after famous people, I’ll study the Agricolaite this week, a Bohemian crystal named after Georgius Agricola. Georg Bauer (Agricola in Latin) was a German scientist from the mid-1400’s that many call the “father of mineralogy” because of the many books he wrote on the subject.

Agricolaite is a yellow green, monoclinic crystal of symmetry B2/b. It comes in tiny, microscopic clusters.  Its geometry makes its core triangle pattern somehow look like a soliton, a unique, self-contained mathematical figure.

So far, Agricolaite has only been found in central Europe. It has been located, identified and approved as a unique crystal in 2010.

Not related, there is also a famous Central Europe board game called Agricola. It is a resource management game. Something the Agricolaite had to face too being that small in the larger mineral universe!

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