Crystal prophecies
By 
Jennifer Newton2024-01-03T09:09:00
There’s no guarantee that making a thermodynamically feasible structure will be easy, or even possible
There’s an unwritten rule that anytime someone discusses crystal structure prediction they must recite the famous quote from physicist John Maddox, during his second stint as editor of Nature over 40 years ago. So here it is: ‘One of the continuing scandals in the physical sciences is that it remains in general impossible to predict the structure of even the simplest crystalline solids from a knowledge of their chemical composition.’
Today, it’s fair to say that Maddox would no longer be scandalised.