[Right Wing Professor]

Would PW Bridgman say crystals are designed? Anyone who has read over his experimental notebooks would pause before answering that. He spent an extravagent amount of effort to get them to grow. Not an easy task. The machinery to do so took almost super-human efforts to construct-destroy-reinvent-and-reconstruct.

No, he wouldn't. A Bridgeman apparatus is merely a way of getting a large single crystal. if you took the same material and did X-ray powder diffraction on it, you'd find the small crystals had the same structure as the large one.

And don't exaggerate. A Bridgeman apparatus is elegant, but not complicated. I've seen a college undergraduate build one.

[bvw]

I'm not exaggerating, which you would know if you had studied any of his work.

[bvw]

And there is a considerable difference between a large single crystal -- which is what people think of when they think "crystal", and a conglomeration of growth faces each only a few atoms thick.