After retiring from a lifetime of work and finding myself with more time on my older hands I decided, at the request of my ever-inquisitive daughter Tracy, to put pen to paper to answer more and more of her inquisitive questions about why at the tender age of seven she'd found herself without a mother to comfort and guide her throughout her forthcoming years. Which of course, if I could document the years prior to and after the time that was to change the course of our normal family life a...

High-pressure science has undergone a revolution in the last 15 years. The development of intense new x-ray and neutron sources, improved detectors, new instrumentation, greatly increased computation power, and advanced computational algorithms have enabled researchers to determine the behavior of matter at static pressures in excess of 400 GPa. Sh