Oleg Zabluda's blog
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
 
My condensed version of AP article
My condensed version of AP article

Shechtman is a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. and Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He is the 10th Israeli Nobel winner.


On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington - Shechtman first observed what are now called "quasicrystals".

"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.

"I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying," he recalled. "I never took it personally. I knew I was right and they were wrong."

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 but was finally published in November 1984 to an uproar in the scientific world.

In 1987, friends in France and Japan succeeded in growing crystals large enough for X-rays to verify what he had discovered with the electron microscope.

"The moment I presented that, the community said, `OK, Danny, now you are talking. Now we understand you. Now we accept what you have found,'" Shechtman told reporters.

The shy, 70-year-old Shechtman said he never doubted his findings and considered himself merely the latest in a long line of scientists who advanced their fields by challenging the conventional wisdom and were shunned by the establishment because of it. 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.'" Shechtman said. "He really was a great scientist, but he was wrong. It's not the first time he was wrong."
http://hosted2.ap.org/apdefault/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-10-05-EU-SCI-Nobel-Chemistry/id-ef5d94a6639c4462bdf8b673338e8f08
http://hosted2.ap.org/apdefault/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-10-05-EU-SCI-Nobel-Chemistry/id-ef5d94a6639c4462bdf8b673338e8f08

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