This is a more streamlined repeat of the workshop held last year. It is intended for complete beginners or for those who did Mineralogy 101 or its equivalent many years ago and find that they have forgotten practically everything, or didn’t understand it.

We will start with a short talk and practical demonstrations to show how crystals and crystalline materials are constructed, why some shapes are possible but not others, and how all of them fall into one of seven groups known as crystal systems. If you have ever played with children’s building blocks, or used bricks to build a wall or tiles to make a floor, you will find all this very straightforward. Having become experts at recognising crystal shapes we will divide into groups for the following activities:

• Using your newly acquired expertise, examine and describe real crystals from the collection in the Tate Museum in hand specimen and under the microscope.
• Under a microscope, watch crystals growing and taking on their characteristic shapes.
• Use black boxes to observe the property of fluorescence (glowing in the dark under ultraviolet light) in a variety of samples. A surprising number of minerals have this property, including of course fluorite which lends its name to the phenomenon.
• Observe other interesting crystal phenomena such as birefringence (crystals that make you see double!), iridescence, magnetism and (very safely!) radioactivity.

On account of limited space and equipment participants will be limited to 12.

Sign the sheet at our February meeting or contact me if you wish to participate in this workshop (contact details above).

Frances Williams