ABSTRACT This paper is partly a summary of the book ‘From a grain of salt to the ribosome’ [1], with extension on some points. Sometimes the developments in science may be very rapid and not fully appreciated at all corners of the scientific society. Harry Clary Jones was a well-known chemist at Johns Hopkins University at the turn of the previous century. He had, in his earlier days, spent time in the laboratories of Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig, Svante Arrhenius in Stockholm and Jacobus van’t Hoff in Amsterdam. He wrote many papers and twelve books. In 1913 he claimed in a book [2]: We do not know the formula of rock salt, or of ice; and we have no reliable means of finding out these simplest matters about solids. Our ignorance of solids is very nearly complete. It is evident that he was unaware of the very recent developments and the revolution in chemistry that had just taken place with the birth of X-ray crystallography.

中文翻译：

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过去和未来的晶体学

摘要 本文是《从一粒盐到核糖体》[1] 一书的部分总结，并在某些方面进行了扩展。有时，科学的发展可能非常迅速，并且在科学社会的各个角落都没有得到充分的重视。Harry Clary Jones 是上世纪之交约翰霍普金斯大学著名的化学家。他早年曾在莱比锡的 Wilhelm Ostwald、斯德哥尔摩的 Svante Arrhenius 和阿姆斯特丹的 Jacobus van't Hoff 的实验室工作过。他写了许多论文和十二本书。1913 年，他在一本书 [2] 中声称：我们不知道岩盐或冰的配方；我们没有可靠的方法来找出这些关于固体的最简单的问题。我们对固体的无知几乎是完全的。