Molecular Forces and Self Assembly: In Colloid, Nano Sciences and Biology, Barry W. Ninham and Pierandrea Lo Nostro, Cambridge U. Press, New York, 2010. $78.00 (365 pp.). ISBN 978-0-521-89600-9
Oil and water don’t like to mingle, yet the droplets of fat in a bottle of milk can remain dispersed for days. How? The usual explanation involves the mutual repulsion of the fat droplets, which are coated by electrically charged proteins. According to the celebrated Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO) theory, developed in the 1940s, the range of the repulsive, electrostatic interaction between droplets is greater than that of the attractive, fluctuating van der Waals interaction. That competition between interactions is a central idea in what once was called colloid science but is now more broadly defined as soft-matter science: the study of solutions containing proteins, polymers, micelles, or other solutes that are big compared to the...
