Dan Shechtman

Dan Shechtman (born 1941) is the Israeli materials engineer who discovered quasicrystals, a form of matter that textbooks had declared impossible, and was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, unshared, for the find. On 8 April 1982, working with an electron microscope on a rapidly cooled aluminum-manganese alloy, he photographed a diffraction pattern with tenfold symmetry, a geometry crystallography’s founding rule said no crystal could ever have. He spent the next several years defending the observation against senior colleagues who told him to leave his research group and against Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel laureate, who called him a “quasi-scientist” until the day Pauling died. Shechtman turned out to be correct, and the discovery forced the International Union of Crystallography to rewrite its own definition of a crystal in 1992.

Who he is

Shechtman was born on 24 January 1941 in Tel Aviv, then still under the British Mandate. His maternal grandfather, Zeev Ashur, had emigrated from Ukraine in the early 1900s and founded Palestine’s first Jewish printing house, working alongside future Israeli leaders David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi; his father emigrated from Ukraine in the 1930s and went into the same trade after marrying into the family. Shechtman has said a magnifying glass his grandfather gave him as a boy set off a lifelong habit of looking closely at ordinary things, insects, sand, flowers, to see how they were built. Like every Israeli, he completed mandatory military service, roughly two and a half years, after high school before starting his degree. He earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the Technion, Israel’s national institute of technology in Haifa, in 1966, followed by a master’s in 1968 and a doctorate in materials engineering in 1972, both also from the Technion, where he has spent nearly his entire career.

What he found

A crystal, by the definition that had stood since the 19th century, is matter whose atoms repeat in a periodic, tiling pattern, and mathematics proves that repeating tiles can only carry two, three, four or sixfold rotational symmetry: squares, triangles, hexagons. Fivefold or tenfold symmetry cannot tile a plane without gaps, the way regular pentagons cannot pack a floor, so classical crystallography treated it as a geometric impossibility for any ordered solid. On sabbatical from the Technion between 1981 and 1983, largely based at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (later renamed NIST) in the Washington, D.C. area, Shechtman rapidly cooled a molten aluminum-manganese mixture and examined the resulting solid under an electron microscope. The diffraction pattern showed sharp, ordered points arranged with tenfold symmetry: a solid that was clearly ordered, clearly not random, and clearly not periodic. It was a new state of matter, later named a quasicrystal, ordered but never repeating, the atomic equivalent of the non-repeating Penrose tilings mathematicians had studied as an abstract curiosity a few years earlier.

Why it was hard to accept

Shechtman’s own account is blunt: colleagues told him the pattern must be an artifact of “twinning,” repeated crystals fused at odd angles, a known and mundane phenomenon, and the head of his research group handed him a crystallography textbook and asked him to leave the team for what he called bringing disgrace on it. Publication took over two years while Shechtman worked to rule out every conventional explanation; the paper finally appeared in Physical Review Letters in November 1984, co-written with John Cahn, Ilan Blech and Denis Gratias. Linus Pauling, already a Nobel laureate in both chemistry and peace, publicly insisted there was “no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-crystallographers,” and kept arguing against Shechtman’s interpretation until Pauling’s death in 1994. Shechtman later described the period simply as being him against the world. Vindication came in 1987, when French and Japanese groups grew quasicrystals large enough to confirm the structure with X-ray diffraction, the gold standard the electron microscope alone could not fully supply.

The scale of the impact

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Shechtman alone, an unusual single-laureate award reserved for discoveries that reshape a field on one person’s evidence. Since 1984, scientists have identified several hundred quasicrystalline compounds, made by casting, vapor deposition and electrodeposition as well as Shechtman’s original rapid-cooling method, and in 1992 the International Union of Crystallography formally rewrote its definition of “crystal” to drop the requirement of strict periodicity, retiring a rule that had stood since the 19th century. Practical uses followed the science: a French manufacturer built a quasicrystal-coated nonstick cookware line marketed as tougher than Teflon (later discontinued over salt-etching issues), a Swedish steelmaker embeds quasicrystal particles in steel as an internal armor for engine components and razor blades, and researchers have used quasicrystalline coatings on fine surgical needles and studied them for heat-resistant diesel-engine parts and light-manipulating metamaterials.

Why a small country produced this

Shechtman’s career is a fixture of Israel’s disproportionate output in applied science, the product of a small population that built a research university system, the Technion foremost, around military-adjacent engineering and then exported the habit of mind into civilian materials science, medicine and technology. His discovery came out of individual stubbornness under professional pressure, not institutional backing; his subsequent decades have gone into building that same stubbornness into others. Since 1986 he has taught a Technion course on technological entrepreneurship that has run for tens of thousands of students and that he has exported through lectures across dozens of countries, arguing that turning scientific training into new ventures, not just papers, is what a resource-poor country under permanent security pressure has to do to compete. He also received Israel’s own top civilian recognition for the discovery, the Israel Prize in physics in 1998, and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1999, awarded by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation, both before the Nobel committee caught up.