Arranged or organized according to a different system or rule, especially referring to irregular structural arrangements in crystallography or polymers.
From Greek 'hetero-' (different) and 'taxis' (arrangement, order). Emerged in 20th-century materials science to describe irregular atomic or molecular packing.
Plastic bottles get their properties from heterotactic molecular arrangements—if polymer chains are scattered randomly rather than neatly stacked, you get a flexible, cloudy plastic instead of a rigid, clear one. The same molecule can be wildly different depending on how its atoms are arranged.
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