• Question: What is the biggest crystal you have seen?

    Asked by anglerge to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: David Briggs

      David Briggs answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      In person, I’ve seen crystals that are a few centimeters across, however, I have seen pictures of a cave in Mexico where crystals have grown to be over 11 meters long!

      http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/photogalleries/giant-crystals-cave/

      They’re pretty huge, no?

    • Photo: Sam Horrell

      Sam Horrell answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I saw some pretty big crystals in a museum in LA, they were probably 7-8 cm across. Most protein crystals are nothing like that though, more in the range of 10-100 micrometers.

    • Photo: Susana Teixeira

      Susana Teixeira answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      A bismuth cylindrical crystal. It was more than half my weight and it was about 10cm diameter, and 30cm length. We use it here to filter off some wavelengths that we do not want in the beams we use.

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