2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: the discovery of quasicrystals
Nobel Prize Medal
October 6, 2011
Yesterday, the Nobel Foundation and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS), Stockholm, Sweden, awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the discovery of quasicrystals,” to the Israeli scientist: Daniel Shechtman, from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
“On the morning of 8 April 1982, an image counter to the laws of nature appeared in Daniel Shechtman’s electron microscope. In all solid matter, atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated periodically over and over again. For scientists, this repetition was required in order to obtain a crystal” said the RSAS.
The RSAS added that “Shechtman’s image, however, showed that the atoms in his crystal were packed in a pattern that could not be repeated. Such a pattern was considered just as impossible as creating a football using only six-cornered polygons, when a sphere needs both five- and six-cornered polygons. His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group. However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.”
“Aperiodic mosaics, such as those found in the medieval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra Palace in Spain and the Darb-i Imam Shrine in Iran, have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level. In those mosaics, as in quasicrystals, the patterns are regular – they follow mathematical rules – but they never repeat themselves,” commented the RSAS.
The next prize to be announced on TheNobelPrize YouTube channel is The Nobel Prize in Literature, Thursday 6 October,1:00 p.m. CET (11:00 a.m. GMT).
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, called Professor Dan Shechtman, and told him that “I would like to congratulate you, on behalf of the citizens of Israel, for your award, which expresses the intellect of our people. Every Israeli is happy today and every Jew in the world is proud. I also congratulated your institution, the Technion, on the centenary of its founding.”
Daniel Shechtman
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