Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman yesterday won the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the secret of quasicrystals, an atomic mosaic whose discovery overturned theories about solids.
Prof. Shechtman, aged 70, ran into fierce hostility among fellow chemists after making a eureka-like discovery in 1982 that at the time was dismissed as laughable.
Today, his work “has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter”, the Nobel jury said.
“It’s a paradigm shift in chemistry. His findings have rewritten the first chapter of textbooks of ordered matter,” Sven Lidin, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a separate tribute.
Quasicrystals are crystals whose atomic pattern is highly geometrical yet never repeats.
To the untutored eye, they look strikingly similar to the tiled patterns of abstract Islamic art.
Prof. Shechtman’s exploit can be pinpointed to April 8, 1982, one of the extremely rare examples when a scientific breakthrough can be dated to a moment in time.
He had melted a mix of aluminium and manganese and then rapidly chilled it before studying the outcome at the atomic level under the electron microscope.
Expecting to see disorder, Prof. Shechtman instead saw concentric circles, each made of 10 bright dots the same distance from each other. Four or six dots in the circles would have been possible, but absolutely not 10 - a finding that caused him to say out loud in Hebrew, “There can be no such creature”. He wrote in his notebook, 10 Fold???
“It was forbidden by the paradigm, by the rules that the International Union of Crystallographers had created,” Prof. Shechtman said in a previous interview with the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa where he is a professor, and rebroadcast by Swedish radio yesterday.
“I was ridiculed. I was treated badly by my peers and my colleagues and the head of my laboratory came to me smiling sheepishly, and he put a book on my desk and said ‘Danny, why don’t you read this and see that it is impossible what you are saying?’”
“I said, ‘I don’t need to read it... I know it’s impossible, but here it is.”
Prof. Shechtman’s findings were so controversial that he was ultimately asked to leave his research group at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.
It was only in November 1984 that Prof. Shechtman was able to find a journal – Physical Review Letters – where with a trio of other researchers he could publish his data.
“The article went off like a bomb among crystallographers,” the Nobel jury said.
“It questioned the most fundamental truth of their science: that all crystals consist of repeating, periodic patterns.”
Quasicrystals have been found in the lab and some have been discovered to occur naturally in minerals.
Their closely-packed structure helps them strengthen materials, with potential outlets in consumer products such as frying pans and machines such as diesel engines which experience high heat and mechanical stress.