“There can be no such creature.”
When Dan Shechtman looked at the picture his microscope had produced in 1982 he couldn’t believe his eyes. He saw a pattern of concentric circles, each made of ten bright dots at the same distance from each other.
The picture told Shechtman that the material he was studying had a crystal structure that had never been seen before, one that did not repeat itself, and was considered to be impossible. It questioned the most fundamental truth of his science: that all crystals consist of repeating, periodic patterns.
It was a discovery that many people did not believe. Shechtman’s discovery, the quasicrystal, caused him to be thrown out of his research group and even to be discredited by a double Nobel Prize laureate, Linus Pauling. However, Shechtman stood up for his work and in 2011 was awarded his own Nobel Prize.
The speech at his Nobel Prize ceremony highlighted that his discovery “has given us a reminder of how little we really know and perhaps even taught us some humility.”
His work is proof that keeping an open mind and daring to question established knowledge may in fact be a scientist’s most important character traits.
Learn more about Shechtman here: https://bit.ly/3hUI0oa
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