1. Concepts and principles

1.1 Definition

The term "soft matter" may seem a little strange, and in fact only really came into use in the early 1990s to describe the activity of the physical chemist studying matter in its condensed state (i.e., not gases or plasmas), but not solids or liquids. The success of this name is certainly linked to the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who has been promoting the discipline for three decades .

But why use the term soft matter? The original meaning of soft is "easily yielding to pressure", "easy to shape", and that's exactly what we're...