Walter Friedrich, pioneer of X-ray diffraction | Penn State News
Behind any outstanding scientist we almost always find a family that offered unconditional support or a group of collaborators who were glad to remain in shadows. But it doesn’t mean that their names should vanish from the collective memory. From the Penn State News comes a story about a pioneer of X-ray diffraction Walter Friedrich (1883-1968).
“It is hard to imagine the field of materials science existing without the contribution of Friedrich and his collaborators,” Heaney said. “Walter Friedrich is hardly remembered today, but he was front and center in a discovery that nearly all scientists would include in a top-10 list of 20th century experiments that changed the world. The crystalline state of matter is interrogated today using essentially the same technique that Friedrich innovated — we just have more intense X-ray sources and more sensitive detectors.”
Read the Article | Penn State News | Jamie Oberdick
Direct link to the interview published in October of 2020 Walter Friedrich unplugged: his 1963 interview in East Berlin
Historical Context : X-Ray Crystallography - Wikipedia
A powder x-ray diffractometer in motion
“X-Ray crystallography is a tool used for identifying the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal. The movement of the machine during 80 second scan can give different view on how relatively slow scientific measurements can look frozen in time by shutter speed of 90 seconds.”
Kaspar Kallip, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons