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Fractals in Chemistry by A. Harrison

Article in The Chemical Educator · October 1998

DOI: 10.1007/s00897980246a

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Vol. 3  Iss. 5  ISSN 1430-4171
The Chemical Educator  http://journals.springer-ny.com/chedr
© 1998 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.  S 1430-4171 (98) 05246-0 
Book Review
 

Fractals in Chemistry by A. Harrison

  Reviewed by
David Avnir
Institute of Chemistry and the Lise Meitner Minerva Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel Jerusalem 91904, Israel
david@chem.ch.huji.ac.il
 

Fractals in Chemistry by A. Harrison. Oxford Chemistry Primers, Vol. 22, Oxford Science Publications, Oxford,
1995, ISBN 0-19-855767-1, 90 pp, UK price 5 pounds, 99 pp.

In the plethora of books devoted to fractals, this modest, primer-size book is a welcomed addition, filling in the
long-overdue niche of presenting this topic to undergraduate chemistry students. Whereas these students are
the primary target of this Oxford series, this book is of value to graduate students as well, not only in
chemistry but in neighboring domains such as materials and polymers science, surface and colloid science,
geochemistry, and physics.

The main aim of the book is to show the curious student, who has been accustomed to think of nature in
terms of perfect geometry of flat planes, exact spheres, ideal pyramids, and so on, that nature is much more
complex, and that fractal geometry offers an entry to the study of this complexity and of its effects. The direct
relevance to the chemistry student in this area stems from the recognition that many heterogeneous
processes are highly sensitive to the details of the geometry that defines the heterogeneity. A celebrated
example is catalyst activity, which is intimately dictated by geometric details of a catalyst's structure. This is
true for unsupported catalysts, for supported ones, and for the supports themselves. In some notable cases,
such as zeolites and well-defined metal crystals, the problem of quantifying both the description of the
morphology and its effects on activity is accessible by standard geometrical tools. However, unless special
care is taken, production of supports, catalysts, and other materials results in structural disorder and
complexity. In industry and in the laboratory, these are actually the majority of cases, leading to questions
such as: what is the meaning of surface area when, for convoluted surfaces, it depends on the size of the
yardstick molecule used to determine the surface area?

It must be stated clearly that by no means, and rightly so, does Harrison propose that fractal geometry is the
general, ultimate solution to structural problems in chemistry; but it is proposed that by adopting and adapting
some concepts of fractal geometry, one can illuminate heterogeneous chemistry from a new angle, and
provide hitherto unattainable insights on the sensitivity of reactivity to the details of structure in its broadest
sense. Indeed it is perhaps in order to comment now on what can and what cannot be claimed by fractal
analysis of experimental data from the practical point of view.

Fractal analysis is a tool with which one analyzes how a given property of matter, either extensive (e.g.,
absolute surface area) or intensive (e.g., density), changes with the resolution of its measurement. In that
sense, fractal analysis is a resolution analysis. Such is proven practically useful if a simple relation between
property and resolution emerges, allowing both the condensation of data into few parameters and some finite
 range of predictability. It has been an empirical observation, the roots of which are yet an enigma, that in
many cases the scaling relation that is obtained takes the form of a simple power law of the form
measured property = k(resolution) b

where b is a constant that defines the sensitivity to resolution changes. Often then, the exponent has been
further interpreted in terms of a simple function of the fractal dimension. Such further interpretation is not
always needed, but it has helped researchers to link experimental observations to simulations and to
theoretical approaches that have fractal structures at their base. And again, while this power-law scaling
relation is not necessarily the only one of interest, it is the focus of this Primer because it has been observed
in a wide range of materials, processes, and reactions. A practice has emerged in the scientific literature that
whenever one encounters such an empirical relation, one often terms it a "fractal scaling relation." Indeed, the
main feature of fractal geometry that made it a priori attractive for approaching the problems of structural
complexity has been the resemblance of theoretical objects generated by fractal geometry algorithms to many
cases of realistic disorder found in the material world. In particular, the shapes of these objects are
characterized by self-similarity, namely by invariance to transformation of scale.

Yet one must stress the clear distinction between the teaching of fractal geometry as a theoretical
mathematical tool, and the experimentally observed power laws which have been interpreted in terms of
fractal objects. In the former, one should have the scaling relation over very many orders of magnitude (in
fact, an infinite number of orders); in practice, however, one usually observes about one order of magnitude,
maybe two, rarely spanning beyond it. These limited range is the outcome of the dictates of lower and upper
cutoffs inherent in any real system. Is it then justified to call such objects fractal? It is an open debate. The
view of this reviewer is that yes, the benefits of analyzing complex structures in terms of a resolution analysis,
and in terms of a resulting limited-range power law, greatly outweigh the demands of mathematical rigor. Thus
fractal geometry, in its more relaxed and imperfect practical form, has greatly facilitated the revolution in
contemporary heterogeneous chemistry which, at last, has embraced the so-called pathological structures as
a legitimate child. This revolution is clearly and concisely explained by Harrison in this book, which I highly
recommend not only for the bookshelf of practitioners of heterogeneous chemistry, but also to be read and
taught.

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