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Prof. Dan Shechtman's discovery of quasi-crystals has implications for chemistry, physics, materials engineering and even art

This is what Prof. Ishtavan Hargitay from the Budapest University of Technology and author of biographies of scientists says, one of the guests who participated in the scientific conference that dealt with quasi-crystals, in honor of Prof. Dani Shechtman, the discoverer of the phenomenon, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday
The article was published in the Technion magazine

Prof. Danny Shechtman. Photo: Technion
Prof. Danny Shechtman. Photo: Technion

"Often in science when new fundamental discoveries are made it takes time to accept it because people's thinking is used to the old ways. It takes years and years and it succeeded because he changed the field very quickly. He didn't stay in it alone. Even today we look back and say that this was an amazing discovery in materials science, in physics and chemistry and even in art. There were artists who created works using the symmetries that Shechtman proved possible." This is how Prof. Istvan Hargitay, from the Center for Material Structures and Models at the University of Technology and Economics in Budapest and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, explains. who was one of the guests at a scientific conference on the occasion of Prof. Danny Shechtman's 70th birthday

 

In 1982 while at Johns Hopkins University, Schechtman was the first to discover solid materials with pentagonal symmetry. This discovery led to the understanding that solid matter is sometimes organized in quasi-periodic crystals (in which the atoms are arranged in pentagonal symmetry), until then, after about a quarter of a million crystals were discovered over the course of seventy years, the basic premise of this science was that a crystal could have symmetry of order 1,2,3,4,6 ,5. Not 6 and not more than 25. In the notebook in which he described the experiment in which he created an alloy containing 75% manganese and XNUMX% aluminum, and the repetitions on it and checking that it was not a failure of any kind. It took another two years before Prof. Shechtman was able to convince his colleagues, some of them from the Technion, of the rightness of his way, but the first article they wrote was rejected by the journal Applied Physics. Shechtman and his colleagues did not give up, they continued to conduct experiments and in the end they managed to publish the article in Physical Row Letters. The article led to experiments all over the world that confirmed the discovery.

The discovery did not go smoothly, the head of the group in which he worked asked him to leave the research group because he was defaming it, and many suggested that he interpret the results in a way that fits with the existing paradigm, but he insisted, and managed to convince

"The great scientists, of the type of Nobel laureates or other important scientists, have two basic qualities - motivation and curiosity," he said. Schechtman discovered a phenomenon that was previously thought to be impossible. He first had to convince himself that it was not a mistake, which was relatively easy, but then he also had to convince all the other scientists involved in the study of crystals and even had to face one of the most important scientists of the 15th century, Linus Pauling who won the Nobel Prize twice And Asher did not believe in the discovery, but Danny Shechtman continued to insist on his opinion and this resulted in the fact that today all scientists in the field accept and appreciate his discovery.

Hargitay's hobby is writing biographical books about other scientists, he conducted investigations and interviews with Nobel Prize winners in the fields of exact sciences and recently published a book about the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller. "Prof Shechtman made an amazing discovery in 1982 and published it in 1984. He changed the paradigm, the dogma in science, which says that certain types of symmetries are impossible. It was such an accepted piece of knowledge that even Dan Shechtman as a student had to pass tests and prove it mathematically."

"He created to some extent a new type of material, but because it was an amazing discovery it was not easy for him to convince other scientists to accept the result. First he had to convince people that it was indeed a discovery because their first inclination was to think that there was an error in the measurement or that the data could be interpreted in another way. He was also inexperienced in publishing research. He did not expect the discovery. You can say that this is serendipity (something similar to Saul who was looking for Athens and found the AB monarchy). It took a while before he could write a good article about it and he vouched for it with people, others, that is, even if it was a discovery by one person, the article published in 1984 was signed by Shechtman and three others who were not involved in the discovery but were involved in the interpretation of the discovery."
Today the science of quasi-periodic crystals or for short quasi-crystals as it was later called is a vibrant science. Hundreds of substances of this type have been discovered.

Prof. Shechtman has so far won many awards, including the Israel Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Emet Prize, and many other prizes, including the 2000 Georgi Aminoff Crystallography Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences - the same academy that awards the Nobel Prizes.
Prof. Shechtman thanked the president of the Technion Peretz Lavi, the head of the faculty Prof. Wayne Kaplan and Dr. Boaz Pokroy for organizing the conference in which about twenty scientists from around the world participated.

8 תגובות

  1. I predict he will receive a Nobel Prize for this discovery.
    You will see, later this year.
    (Oh, see the date? Shit)

  2. This article has interesting extensions:

    http://physicaplus.org.il/zope/home/he/3/Lifshitz

    At the moment there is also a small technical glitch and in a certain area it seems as if nothing is written around the images.
    In fact, it is written there - but in white.
    To see the text easily, you just need to mark the entire area (for example, by pressing the mouse on the left).

  3. A question for those in the know:
    Does Shechtman's discovery have any technological applications?

  4. Which means that the golden ratio appears in nature on a molecular scale.
    By the way, these are three-dimensional dice that contain the pentagonal symmetry.
    12 vertices of pentagons therefore it can be blocked by the dodecahedron dodecahedron.

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