A boy and a mysterious island
Dan Shechtman was born on January 24, 1941, in Tel Aviv, then in British Mandate Palestine, into a Jewish family with deep roots in the land. His grandparents had immigrated during the Second Aliyah, the wave of Jewish settlement in the early twentieth century, and founded a printing house. He grew up in Petah Tikva and Ramat Gan.
As a child he read Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island again and again. Its hero, the engineer Cyrus Smith, builds a working civilisation for a band of castaways out of nothing but knowledge and ingenuity, and the young Dan decided that he wanted to be like that. He set his heart on becoming an engineer.
Engineer turned scientist
Shechtman studied mechanical engineering at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, graduating in 1966. That year Israel was in recession and he could not find a job, so he stayed on for a master’s degree in materials engineering, completed in 1968. In the process, he later said, he fell in love with science, and he went on to a doctorate, which he received in 1972.
After postdoctoral work at the Aerospace Research Laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, studying titanium alloys, he joined the Technion faculty in 1975. He became an expert in electron microscopy, the technique of firing beams of electrons through thin slices of material to reveal how their atoms are arranged.
Ten dots that should not exist
In 1981 Shechtman went on sabbatical to the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, near Washington, to study rapidly cooled alloys of aluminium and other metals. On the morning of April 8, 1982, looking at a sample of aluminium and manganese, he saw a diffraction pattern in his electron microscope that should have been impossible: concentric circles of ten bright dots. In his notebook he wrote, “10 Fold???”
For more than seventy years scientists had defined a crystal as a solid in which atoms are packed in a pattern that repeats regularly, like tiles on a bathroom floor. Mathematics showed that such repeating patterns can have two-, three-, four- or six-fold symmetry, but never five- or ten-fold, just as you cannot tile a floor with pentagons alone. Shechtman’s sample was clearly ordered, but in a way that never repeated itself. He had found a new kind of matter, now called a quasicrystal, whose atoms are arranged like the intricate non-repeating mosaics of medieval Islamic art in the Alhambra palace in Spain.
Mathematicians had already imagined such patterns. In the 1970s the British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose found ways to tile a surface with just two shapes in a pattern that never repeats, and the crystallographer Alan Mackay showed that if atoms were placed on a Penrose pattern, they would produce exactly the kind of ten-fold diffraction Shechtman later saw. The distances between atoms in a quasicrystal follow the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence, the same mathematics that fascinated the ancient Greeks. The order is perfectly regular, following strict mathematical rules, but it is not periodic. Shechtman had no idea of this work when he made his discovery; he simply believed what his microscope was showing him.
Ridicule and persistence
The reaction was brutal. Many colleagues insisted that he was seeing twinned crystals, ordinary crystals grown together. The head of his laboratory handed him a textbook on crystallography and suggested he read it; when Shechtman would not back down, he was asked to leave the research group because he was an embarrassment. His first paper was rejected almost immediately. The most famous chemist in the world, the double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, attacked the claim for years and is reported to have said that there is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.
Shechtman trusted his experiments more than the textbooks. Back at the Technion he persuaded his colleague Ilan Blech to help interpret the pattern, and in November 1984 he and three colleagues, John Cahn, Denis Gratias and Blech, published the discovery in Physical Review Letters. Within weeks, theorists showed that it matched mathematical models of non-repeating patterns. Other laboratories soon made quasicrystals of their own, and hundreds have since been produced. In 1992 the International Union of Crystallography changed the very definition of a crystal to include them. In 2009 natural quasicrystals were found in a mineral from the Khatyrka River in far-eastern Russia.
The episode is now taught as a classic case of how science corrects itself. The Nobel committee pointed out that even the greatest scientists can get stuck in convention, noting that one of Shechtman’s fiercest critics had himself won two Nobel Prizes. For Shechtman the lesson was about evidence. Asked years later about the difference between science and politics, he said that science is objective. In the words of the Nobel committee, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.
Hard, slippery and useful
Quasicrystals turned out to have unusual properties. They are very hard, have slippery, non-stick surfaces and conduct heat and electricity poorly. A Swedish company found that a particularly durable steel owed its strength to tiny quasicrystal particles embedded in a softer steel, acting like armour; the Nobel committee noted that this steel is used in products such as razor blades and the fine needles used in eye surgery. Quasicrystal coatings have been tested on frying pans, and researchers are exploring them for heat insulation in engines, for turning waste heat into electricity, and in energy-saving light-emitting diodes.
Just as important, the discovery changed how scientists think about order in nature, and it has become a celebrated example of why science must keep an open mind. The Nobel committee wrote that keeping an open mind and daring to question established knowledge may be a scientist’s most important qualities.
The Nobel Prize
In October 2011 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Shechtman the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, unshared, for the discovery of quasicrystals, saying it had fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter. He had already received Israel’s highest scientific honours, including the Israel Prize in 1998 and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1999. He has held appointments at Iowa State University and the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory alongside his post at the Technion.
Teaching a nation to build companies
Shechtman’s other great contribution has been as a teacher. When he became a full professor at the Technion in 1986, he decided to use his freedom to create something new: a course he called Technological Entrepreneurship. The first time it was offered, in 1987, some 800 students turned up for a hall approved for 600. The course brings in successful and struggling entrepreneurs, lawyers, accountants and patent experts, and teaches students frankly that most new technology companies fail, and that failure is acceptable. By his account more than 10,000 Israeli engineers and scientists have taken it, many of whom went on to found companies. He has said he does not claim to be the father of the start-up nation, but that he contributed to it. His message to students is simple: think with an entrepreneurial mind, and if you fail, start again. He has argued that Israelis seem to fear failure less than people elsewhere, and that governments can help by creating the economic conditions in which start-ups grow.
He has also campaigned for science education for very young children. In 2012 he started a programme in Haifa to teach science to kindergarten teachers, helped launch science kindergartens in Israel, and presented a series on Israeli educational television in which he does experiments with six-year-olds. He describes himself as a kind of missionary for education, science and technological entrepreneurship.
Israel and Jewish heritage
Shechtman is a son of the Zionist pioneer generation: his grandparents were among the immigrants who built the Jewish community of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, and he grew up as the State of Israel was born. He has spent nearly his whole career at the Technion and has spoken often of Israel’s need to invest in the brains of its young people. In 2014 he briefly stood for the largely ceremonial office of President of Israel, saying that he had not wanted to go into politics but to use the office to influence Israel’s education system and represent the country abroad; he received only one vote in the Knesset, and the press, with some affection, dubbed him the quasi-president. He has also chaired the international scientific council of Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia.
He is married to Tzipora Shechtman, a professor at the University of Haifa. They have a son, the physicist Yoav Shechtman, and three daughters.
Legacy
Shechtman’s quasicrystals forced a whole science to rewrite its textbooks and opened a new family of materials still being explored for tougher steels, better coatings and energy technologies. His Technion course helped give thousands of young Israelis the confidence to turn ideas into companies, and his television lessons and kindergarten programmes aim to start that process much earlier. His life is also a lesson in scientific courage: a researcher told to go back and read the textbook, who instead made the textbook change.
Sources & further reading
Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011, NobelPrize.org · Popular information: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011, NobelPrize.org · Committed to teaching science and entrepreneurship: Dan Shechtman, Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings · Known for chemistry, Israeli Nobel laureate also champions tech entrepreneurship, The Algemeiner (JNS) · Dan Shechtman, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.