Soft matter: more than words

Abstract

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes has worked on soft matter for most of his life, and he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991 "for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers". He is regarded as a founding father of soft matter research. Here he gives his opinion on what constitutes soft matter and what the future holds for the soft matter communities.