Quasicrystals

The Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to Israeli researcher Daniel Shechtman for his discovery of quasicrystals. Quasicrystals are regular but non-repeating patterns of atoms and were discovered already in 1982 but it was a long time before their existence was widely accepted.

According to The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences "the discovery fundamentally altered how chemists conceived of solid matter, since previously they had believed that all crystals consisted of entirely regular, repeating configurations of atoms."

After reporting his ground breaking findings Professor Shechtman was forced to leave his work and was med with ridicule and scorn from his colleagues, but 29 years later he receives the Nobel Prize.

Galileo Galilei said, "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”