Dan Shectmann Receives Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Friday, October 7th, 2011Oct. 7, 2011
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded on September 5 to Israeli chemist Dan Shechtman of Technion–The Israeli Institute of Technology. Shechtman received the award for his 1982 discovery of quasicrystals. Quasicrystals are a previously unknown form of matter with a structure that scientists had believed was impossible.
Crystals are substances that are made of atoms arranged in an ordered repeating pattern. Almost all solid materials consist of crystals. The atoms of a quasicrystal are ordered but not repeating. It was later discovered that a quasicrystal’s structure closely follows a longstanding mathematical principle called the golden section. The golden section–or “phi”–is a special number approximately equal to 1.618; it appears many times in geometry and is often used in art and architecture.
Shechtman’s discovery, made while working at the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology, first met with strong resistance from fellow scientists. After more examples were brought to light, a belief in the existence of the quasicrystal gained wide acceptance. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences characterized Shechtman’s discovery as fundamentally changing the way chemists look at solid matter.
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