The Nobel Prize-Winning Discovery that Got a Scientist Kicked Out of His Own Lab [View all]

[n2doc]

Almost 30 years after Daniel Shechtman noticed something weird in his lab, he finally won a Nobel Prize for chemistry. But before that, his strange discovery resulted in him being asked to leave the lab for bringing disgrace upon his colleagues.

What caused all this upheaval? An odd pattern. Nothing more. See how a seemingly minor idea blew up into a huge controversy.

In 1982 Daniel Shechtman was quietly told to move out of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. One would think he was eating plutonium to try to become the Hulk, but no. All he did was peer through an electron microscope at a pool of rapidly cooling pool of aluminum and manganese and notice something weird. The diffraction pattern of the electrons indicated that atoms were arranging themselves into little five-'pointed' shapes. Each of the 'points' was a little atom, and whole structure was cooling so that the points were locked together in something that could not quite be called a pattern. A pattern repeats itself regularly, and these shapes didn't. And yet there weren't any gaps or openings either. Little 'glue atoms' filled up the spaces and left the entire thing locked in a stable structure.

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http://io9.com/5881913/the-discovery-that-got-a-scientist-tossed-out-of-a-lab-and-then-won-him-a-nobel-prize