2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Posted on October 9, 2011 Comments (3)
Dan Shechtman, Israel Institute of Technology, 2011 Nobel Laurette in Chemistry
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2011 to Dan Shechtman, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel for the discovery of quasicrystals.
In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves. However, the configuration found in quasicrystals was considered impossible, and Dan Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter.
On the morning of 8 April 1982, an image counter to the laws of nature appeared in Dan 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.
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.
When scientists describe Shechtman’s quasicrystals, they use a concept that comes from mathematics and art: the golden ratio. This number had already caught the interest of mathematicians in Ancient Greece, as it often appeared in geometry. In quasicrystals, for instance, the ratio of various distances between atoms is related to the golden mean.
Following Shechtman’s discovery, scientists have produced other kinds of quasicrystals in the lab and discovered naturally occurring quasicrystals in mineral samples from a Russian river. A Swedish company has also found quasicrystals in a certain form of steel, where the crystals reinforce the material like armor. Scientists are currently experimenting with using quasicrystals in different products such as frying pans and diesel engines.
Related: 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: the Structure and Function of the Ribosome – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 – Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2006)
Read more on the science he has worked on. Our understanding of science is built on the discoveries of our predecessors and on the discoveries that counter what we thought we knew.
Shechtman, however, could rotate his diffraction pattern by a tenth of a full circle (36 degrees) and still obtain the same pattern. Hence he was looking at a tenfold symmetry, one that was considered impossible. It is no surprise, then, that he made no less than three question marks in his notebook.
…
Dan Shechtman peeked out from his office into the corridor at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), wanting to find someone with whom he could share his discovery. But the corridor was empty, so he went back to the microscope to carry out further experiments on the peculiar crystal. Among other things, he double-checked if he had obtained a twin crystal: two intergrown crystals whose shared boundary gives rise to strange diffraction patterns. But he could not detect any signs that he was in fact looking at a twin crystal.
…
Dan Shechtman concluded that the scientific community must be mistaken in its assumptions. When Shechtman told scientists about his discovery, he was faced with complete opposition, and some colleagues even resorted to ridicule. Many claimed that what he had observed was in fact a twin crystal. The head of the laboratory gave him a textbook of crystallography and suggested he should read it.
Shechtman, of course, already knew what it said but trusted his experiments more than the textbook. All the commotion finally led his boss to ask him to leave the research group, as Schechtman himself recalled later. The situation had become too embarrassing.
Categories: Awards, Research, Science
Tags: Awards, chemistry, nobel laureate, Research, Science, scientific inquiry
3 Responses to “2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry”
Leave a Reply
RSS Feed
October 11th, 2011 @ 5:25 pm
This truly is a remarkable find!
I am also currently on tenterhooks awaiting what the findings are at the LHC. If it turns out that the standard model can’t be completed, then where do the scientists go at that point. There really have been some fascinating finds and advances in science in the past few years, and I for one can’t wait to hear about more over the coming years. It’s a very exciting time for the scientific community!
October 10th, 2012 @ 7:44 am
our body is a fine-tuned system of interactions between billions of cells. Each cell has tiny receptors that enable it to sense its environment, so it can adapt to new situtations. Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka are awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family of such receptors: G-protein–coupled receptors…
October 17th, 2012 @ 8:02 pm
[…] the full article here: 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry This entry was posted in Recent. Bookmark the permalink. ← Indian universities fare badly […]