Preface

Summary

Colloid science has its roots in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discoveries concerning the behavior of minute particles. Its early development was stimulated by controversies regarding the very existence of molecules. Scientific interest, along with technological and biological applications, fostered several definitive monographs and textbooks in the 1930s and 1940s. However, interest in the field declined within many academic circles after the Second World War, especially in the United States, despite continued and widespread industrial applications. The resurgence of interest that began in the early 1960s arose from mutually reinforcing events. New technological problems appeared in, for example, the manufacture of synthetic dispersions for coatings, enhanced oil recovery, the development of new fuels, environmental pollution, ceramics fabrication, corrosion phenomena, biotechnology, and separations processes. In addition, monodisperse suspensions of colloidal particles of diverse sorts became readily available and advances in our understanding of fluid mechanics on the colloidal scale burgeoned almost simultaneously. Further stimuli were provided by the appreciation by colloid scientists of advances in the theory of interparticle forces coupled with the development of several new experimental techniques. Forces and particle properties have long been difficult to measure accurately on the colloidal scale and numerical values were often the result of a long uncertain chain of inference. The new techniques made possible direct, accurate measurements of size, shape, and concentration, as well as the attractive and repulsive forces between surfaces separated by a few nanometers.