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

[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

[jody]

1. So if Shechtman's conclusions about nature were eventually proven correct, might not those mystics

who saw an afterlife, a preternatural complement to nature to which we are linked by senses of the physical, might they not also be correct?

[jeff47]

3. Just because one person turned out to be right, doesn't mean everyone else will. (nt)

[jody]

4. I don't understand your point. Intelligent people understand that a single case does not prove

a null hypothesis although it could disprove the alternate.

[mysuzuki2]

6. I don't think so.

of course, we will all find out eventuslly. I will be absolutely delighted to be proved wrong!

[mindwalker_i]

7. One difference between quasicrystals and an afterlife

The quasicrystals have a non-zero amount of evidence supporting their existence. I don't think we'll find out nothin' when we die.

[jeff47]

8. Your post seems to be claiming other people are right because he was. (nt)

[jody]

9. Sorry I claimed nothing. nt

[caraher]

10. Schectman did pretty much exactly the opposite of mystics

He did NOT believe what he saw, initially. He thought of multiple ways he could be wrong - perhaps this was the result of twinning. If it were, the pattern would go away if the diffraction came from a smaller part of the sample - it didn't. I think he also did electron microscopy. He knew it went against the basic tenets of crystallography, and he accepted what the data implied only after submitting it to every attempt at disproof he could come up with.

Then the scientific community did basically the same thing, on a larger scale. I believe Linus Pauling said of Schectman, "There are no quasi-crystals - only quasi-scientists." A key difference between scientists and mystics is that scientists as a community are professional skeptics. Yes, they can also be "dogmatic" about certain things, but those "dogmas" are not merely handed down by authorities as they are under the original meaning of the word but are hard-won principles that seem the best way to explain and organize the widest range of observations. And they can be overthrown.

Mystical experience is intrinsically personal and basically not subject to external scrutiny. Alleged truths derived from mystical experience may or may not be genuine truths, but the personal and subjective nature of that experience pretty much relegates such ideas to a very different realm from science. The success of science in assimilating new information in no way implies anything meaningful about the speculations of mystics possibly being correct.

[Scuba]

12. Well done, thank.

[Motown_Johnny]

11. In the same way that people who thought the Earth was flat might be

right. Or the ones who thought that everything was made up of Fire, Water, Air and Rock.

[Orsino]

13. Not without supporting data, a falsifiable hypothesis, and peer-reviewed, reproducible results.

Until then, wishing that these things might be obtained at some point in the future is fairly meaningless.

[Lionessa]

2. Really cool article and well written for my layman scientific comprehension level.

Sometimes I find the concepts really interesting but reading the article just gets too technical for me to follow well. This one, not so. I totally get it, and WOW!

I can understand why this is both so counter-intuitive, and how in spite of that it is the future.

[Thaddeus Kosciuszko]

5. And Struggling Culinary Enthusiasts Have Never Looked Back

[TalkingDog]

14. Scientists and "Skeptics" can be just as fundamentalist and hidebound as any Creationist or Jihadist

Especially when funding and reputation are involved.

Not a fan of "scientists" and "skeptics", but give me a scientist or a skeptic any day.