Metin Tolan

How do James Bond’s X-ray glasses work, the ones he uses to see whether the lady at the roulette table has a pistol concealed in her underwear? Is it really possible to launch oneself into the air and catch up with a plane that is free-falling towards the earth? Or to shoot down a helicopter with a pistol? In this lively and informative book, Germany's boldest physics professor Metin Tolan analyses the stunts and gadgets of the 007 films and even answers the question of all questions: Why does Bond drink his vodka martini shaken, not stirred? "So much entertaining science is a rare thing." Spiegel Online

The properties of soft-matter thin films (e.g. liquid films, polymer coatings, Langmuir-Blodgett multilayers) nowadays play an important role in materials science. They are also very exciting with respect to fundamental questions: In thin films, liquids and polymers may be considered as trapped in a quasi-two-dimensional geometry. This confined geometry is expected to alter the properties and structures of these materials considerably. This volume is dedicated to the scattering of x-rays by soft-matter interfaces. X-ray scattering under grazing angles is the only tool to investigating these materials on atomic and mesoscopic length scales. A review of the field is presented with many examples.