When Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman claimed to have stumbled upon a new crystalline chemical structure that seemed to violate the laws of nature, colleagues mocked him, insulted him and exiled him from his research group. ...
"I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying," he recalled. ...
On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington - now called the National Institute of Standards and Technology - Shechtman first observed crystals with a shape most scientists considered impossible.
The discovery had to do with the idea that a crystal shape can be rotated a certain amount and still look the same. A square contains four-fold symmetry, for example: If you turn it by 90 degrees, a quarter-turn, it still looks the same. For crystals, only certain degrees of such symmetry were thought possible. Shechtman had found a crystal that could be rotated one-fifth of a full turn and still look the same.
"I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me," he said in an account released by his university.
He was asked to leave his research group, and moved to another one within the National Bureau of Standards, Shechtman said. He eventually returned to Israel, where he found one colleague prepared to work with him on an article describing the phenomenon. The article was at first rejected ...
he never wavered even in the face of stiff criticism from double Nobel winner Linus Pauling, who never accepted Shechtman's findings.
"He would stand on those platforms and declare, 'Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.'" "
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-dan ... prize.htmlPress Release
5 October 2011
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2011 to
Dan Shechtman
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
"for the discovery of quasicrystals"
A remarkable mosaic of atoms
In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves. However, the configuration found in quasicrystals was considered impossible, and Dan Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ ... press.html
