Man As Microcosm

Israeli scientist Daniel Schechtman just won the Nobel Prize in Chemisty for a discovery that, shall we say, unsettled the settled science:

Crystallographers always believed that all crystals have rotational symmetry, so that when they are rotated, they look the same. In 1982, in Washington, D.C., Shechtman first observed crystals with 10 points — pentagonal symmetry, which most scientists said was impossible.

"I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me," Shechtman said in a description of his work released by his university.

For months he tried to persuade his colleagues of his find, but they refused to accept it. Finally he was asked to leave his research group.

Shechtman returned to Israel, where he found one colleague prepared to work with him on an article describing the phenomenon. The article was at first rejected, but finally published in November 1984 — to uproar in the scientific world. Double Nobel winner Linus Pauling was among those who never accepted the findings.

"He would stand on those platforms and declare, 'Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.'" Shechtman said.

In 1987, friends of Shechtman in France and Japan succeeded in growing crystals large enough for x-rays to repeat and verify what he had discovered with the electron microscope.

Amazing! A man who knew he was right, who stood his ground in the face of near-unanimous obloquy, who changed the world in a profound, fundamental and positive way, and who, ultimately, was accepted and honoured by the global community that had long rejected him. In a way, save for the long-awaited final validation (which, sadly, may never come), hasn't that been Israel's trajectory, too?