generalspeaking

The Open, Questing Mind

Prof. Daniel Shechtman and his microscope (Photo: Avishag Shaar-Yashuv)

That open, questing mind, the mark of a scientist. Although those involved in scientific investigation surely know that no avenue of search and research should be closed and no received wisdom should be considered inviolable and not subject to further investigation, received wisdom of reasonable hypotheses are often taken as representative of a closed matter. Science, like nature, is never closed, and the answers are never absolute.

There is always the possibility of a misconstruction in understanding, of elements and nuances that were not sufficiently considered, of shifting realities that human minds have never been able to uncover and decipher. Until some day some truly incandescently bright mind makes a discovery. And that discovery, as has occurred through the history of scientific investigation, upsets a theory that scientific practitioners have accepted as closed.

Hell hath few furies to match those of scientists who envision the structure upon which all their life-work has been based, with all the resulting and accepted theories and practises turned upside-down to accommodate a new, truly irritating and inconvenient attempt at introducing a spanner in the smoothly running gears of knowledge. That investigator who has disclosed his findings finds himself scorned, condemned, ostracized.

From Copernicus and Galileo to modern-day seekers-after-nature's realities the story rarely changes.Daniel Shechtman, 2011's Nobel laureate for chemistry, was hounded and ridiculed by the scientific community which insisted that his finding of an entirely new class of solid material was an impossibility. Another Nobel laureate, Linus Pauling, launched a crusade against Daniel Shechtman saying "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists".

Three decades ago Daniel Shechtman saw through an electron microscope what no one else had previously witnessed; a metal alloy forming an unfamiliar pattern in chemistry, but one which had its place in ancient art, a pattern which formed but did not proceed to replicate itself endlessly. He observed atoms in a crystal he had made from a five-sided pattern, defying received wisdom that such patterns must create repetitious patterns.

He had been working in the United States as part of a research team at the time, and when he revealed to them his discovery they were thunderstruck with disbelief. He was advised to return to his textbooks where he would most certainly find that what he described was simply not possible. And he was asked by the head of the research group to leave for "bringing disgrace" to the research team.

The Nobel Committee, in awarding the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Dr. Shechtman, an Israeli working at the Technion Institute in Haifa, noted the controversial nature of his discovery.

"His battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter."

Quasicrystalline matter comprises a third possibility in the state of solid matter; the first two are solid, and amorphous. The third way led to an opening for industrial use of new kinds of materials.

And that discovery marks Daniel Shechtman's legacy to the world of science and progress. The Nobel Prize is the recognition of his genius.

Labels: Nature, Science

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, October 06, 2011