October 5, 2011

expert reaction to the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry

The Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to Prof Danny Shechtman for his discovery of quasicrystals, metallic alloys with very unusual structures.

Prof Ronan McGrath from the University of Liverpool, said:

“In my opinion Danny Shechtman fully deserves the prize. Lesser scientists might have put his unusual result to one side and dismissed it as a measurement error of some sort. Shechtman is a careful experimentalist and trusted his own ability as a scientist. He spent more than two years learning to understand the implications of his discovery before he announced it to the scientific community in 1984.

“Even then it was initially controversial, with eminent scientists such as Linus Pauling offering alternative explanations. Eventually the weight of scientific evidence was such that his findings could not be dismissed. Today there are hundreds of scientists world-wide specialising in studying quasicrystals and their properties.

“Nature has ways of surprising us – sometimes discoveries are planned, sometimes something unexpected and wonderful such as quasicrystals comes along. They have completely changed our understanding of crystallography.”