By David Bradley
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2011 to Daniel Shechtman
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel “for the discovery of quasicrystals”
I got my tweet out seconds before NobelPrize_org and certainly before the rest of the chemistry blogosphere. Sad or what?
In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world (see my Alhambra photos for examples) reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves. However, the configuration found in quasicrystals was considered impossible, and Daniel Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive... More...
