Book Review: (4) A Bravo to Bravais - The Bravais Lattices Song

Being a thespian patron of the scientific art, it is perhaps not surprising that the mischievous muses, the Muse of Music and the Muse of Crystallinity, have their debauchful way with me, often at unexpected and inconvenient moments.

Recently, while trawling through the Internet morass, a site that gained my attention was the "The Bravais Lattices Song" by Walter Fox Smith; sung to the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" by William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. PDF and word files are downloadable with the lyrics, and MP3 and Real Audio files of the song being played and sung by Bruce Morrison, Marian McKenzie, Michael K. McCutchan and Faith H. McKenzie. It starts with a quartet of obvious universal appeal, even to the most amorphous heart.

"If you have to fill a volume with a structure that's repetitive,
Just keep your wits about you, you don't need to take a sedative!
Don't freeze with indecision, there's no need for you to bust a seam!
Although the options may seem endless, really there are just fourteen!"

Even with the misaligned voices of the chorus, and levels of noise indicating an ignorance of counting statistics and signal to background ratios, tears well up in the eyes with such lyrics as:

"The cubic is the most important one in my 'exparience',
It comes in simple and in face- and body-centered variants."

So true, so true.

And thus the lyrics continue, educating not only the two dimensional heart, but the three dimensional mind about the 7 crystal systems and the fourteen Bravais lattices.

Some, with "modern" views of education may be concerned that a song like this could challenge delicate young minds the "wrong way". That symmetry-song lovers should be strongly cautioned and parental advisories issued. These are the minds and opinions of the merohedrally twinned!

Give the young good crystallographic nectar to drink and symmetric oceans to swim in at as early an age as possible. Get them comfortable thinking in three dimensions; seeing mirrors, centres of inversion, rotation, translations, glides and screws; not just splashing around, drowning in an ocean of GUI diffraction, that claims to completely sample everything, but by itself leads to an understanding of nothing. What be it if the school and university youth of today are not all destined to enter the Elysium basements of crystallography.

Songs like this can only give an appreciation of the undervalued and undertaught arts of crystallographic symmetry. While one might fear the havoc an unethical monster with a karaoke machine could inflict, Walter Fox Smith's efforts are a laudable effort to be praised and congratulated.

Paderewski Dolding-Beadle