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PENROSE TILING shares the quasicrystal similarity of having patterns that do not repeat.
Image: Inductiveload/Wikimedia Commons
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded today to Daniel Shechtman of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Shechtman discovered what are called quasicrystals, a finding that fundamentally altered the understanding of solid matter.
At an announcement event today in Stockholm, Sven Lidin of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described the atoms and clusters within a quasicrystal: “It is perfectly ordered, it is infinite—and yet it never repeats itself.”
Such patterns can be seen in Islamic mosaics and the tilings of mathematical physicist Roger Penrose. "Daniel Shechtman’s discovery was to show that they existed also in chemical systems…the most important thing about the quasicrystals are their meaning for fundamental science," Lidin said. "They have rewritten the first chapter in the textbooks of ordered matter.
“But we also find them in useful objects," he added. "… They have been used in experiments to strengthen turbine blades…these applications come out of the specific properties of quasicrystals, that they are poor conductors of heat…they have low friction and they have low adhesion properties.”
Shectman made his initial observations on quasicrystals while working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Md.
Click here for a story on quasicrystal patterns in Islamic mosaics.
Martin Gardner wrote about Penrose tiles and quasicrystals in his final column for Scientific American.
This video features Schechtman discussing quasicrystals and scientists' initial reactions to his findings.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRejected Nobel-Quality Research
Someone last year published a list of research papers that were rejected by editors and academic peers, but that later went on to be very important papers, and even a surprising number of Nobel-prize-winning works. The near-total rejection of Mitchell Feigenbaum's seminal work on deterministic chaos is an archetypal example.
Here we have yet another example of important research that was rejected by editors and peers, and yet eventually won the Nobel Prize.
What does this say about the ability of even the most highly regarded editors and academic peers in assessing the importance of ideas that do not conform to pre-existing paradigms?
It is fairly obvious that an only extremely small percentage of scientists have the wisdom and judgement needed for this special ability.
Fortunately, the innovators are a persistent lot.
RLO
http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw
What I read was Penrose saw the beauty and Daniel Schechtman saw the application. The whole process is still like the academy awards but the application is often more important than the aesthetics. There were 3 Nobel Prizes given out early on for quantum dynamics yet the 4th one should have been given to Freeman Dyson for his ability to explain it to the rest of us in terms that make sense. I thank the big singularity for a trip out west by two wild and crazy guys and I did not hear one peep of dissatisfaction from Dyson for what if not done would have keep the beauty of QED and what followed as a strange concept that kept Bohr and Einstein awake at night.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo what is the big deal. We had two wonderful prizes awarded in the work being done on Graphine last year and between that, Buckeye Balls, Nano-Tubes, Composites and diamond seeding we continue to burn the stuff faster than apply it. Penrose is bright and all that but because he is part of the group thought string theory group (I blame you Lee Smolin for your book and Eric Hoffer from his 1951 True Believer) I am glad someone else got it. Yeahh, Raw, Raw, Raw watch your sushi.
The cell has a nucleus with chips (nuclei) of itself in orbit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHorizontally to the nuclei orbit, chips are flung out to produce a pole on each side of the orbit.
The cell Earth with one orbit, rock with two some minerals and all life with three and a new species (BRAIN) with four.
By chewing pollen the bee produces a glob of wax. Immediately after the placement, the saliva or water of the glob interacts in repelling the wax away from the glob's nucleus.
The wax takes on the shape produced from the three nuclei orbits of the water nucleus. What is called evaporation leaves an empty six pole or six sided wax structure.
This article has me scrambling to discover what else on earth would have ten poles. Ghost, spirit, bigfoot, ufo? hmmmmmmmm
cbc.ca bruce voigt
PS -- The Earth has its nucleus nuclei orbiting "equatorially" from West to East. Through centrifugal force nuclei spiral horizontally away from the orbit producing our North (counter clockwise) and South (clock wise) poles.
The text book diagram showing the Earths Magnetic Field is "wrong"!
Lee Smolin wrote a book a while back called 'the Trouble with Physics' in which he attacks what has been well documented since the days of T.H White and well described in the 1951 book by Eric Hoffer called the True Believer. What Lee discusses is how even in science where one would expect objectivity versus segregation the ideal of group thought has taken over.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think we are wired in this respect as a species but because of our intelligence it is a shame we cannot walk out of this spider trap. In some of Smolin's other work in loop quantum gravity he presents a coginate argument that time and space become a subjective relationship that because it is only shared by each other then all things we describe as space, time and I am starting to think gravity are all subjective meaning that there is no universal time, space or gravity and some of the recent articles in SCIAM are starting to fall in line with this ideal.
But his work on group thought and some what like Betaa Max vs VHS the winner is not picked by best answer but by best marketing approach. His argument against it is that funding for grants is hard enough and because this grouping around on solution kills funding on other science that may hold better answers.
Anyway this is some food for thought and we often forget that religion and science are from the same parents and I think we can see how fractured the world is with my God is better than your God.
I am rereading a book called Decipher written by Stel Pavlou back in 2001. He used the theory of myths to tie future events and is all over the place but what is interesting is his ideals on nano machines, buckeye balls and no less quasicrystals. I don't read a lot of fiction with Nelson Demille my favorite and Clancy when he really writes the book.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever this book deals in myths, C60, nano technology, language origins, pyramids throughout the world. The premise is that the sun turns out to be a very weird pulsar that comes to life once every 4000 years and of course 2012 is the year. Anyway the insight and some of the chemistry and physics that are walking off with the Nobel prizes have a lot of early publicity from about 10 years ago. If you get a chance and need a break from real science this is a fun book and prophetic in many ways.
You can construct very strange repeated patterns using binary tree plots. 72° gives networks of interlinked polygons of many orders which would be a stereochemists nightmare!
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