Description

This item is a ball-and-stick molecular model of the crystal structure of miargyrite (AgSbS2 Monoclinic C2/c). The model has yellow, silver, and copper-colored balls.

As a graduate student in mineralogy at MIT in the late 1920s, Martin Buerger became interested in the way that the structures of crystals changed their properties. The precision and order of the rules expressed in crystals appealed to his strong Lutheran faith, and the properties still left to discover appealed to his scientific curiosity. Buerger used the new technique of X-ray diffraction, looking at the patterns made by bouncing X-rays off a crystal, to study the arrangement of atoms in crystals. He built his own equipment from the designs proposed in scientific papers, sometimes even before the original authors had finished their own versions, and invented new instruments for making accurate models like this one.