Rebel with a Nobel Prize: The Lesson of Daniel Shechtman

Dr. Daniel Shechtman's discovery did not sit well with the scientific elite and he made some people angry because of it. In 1982 Dr. Shechtman observed a crystal that did not obey the physical laws that crystals are supposed to obey. These crystals are now called quasicrystals, and they have changed the way chemists view solid state chemistry. Almost thirty years later, Shechtman received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery.

What are quasicrystals? Before the discovery of...