Nobel laureate marks Bragg centenary

Professor Dan Shechtman celebrated crystallography's profound impact on modern science in the Bragg Centenary Lecture 2013 - and explained how he overturned one of the discipline's key principles. Professor Shechtman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011, spoke in the University’s Rupert Beckett Lecture Theatre on November 21 at the culmination of a year of events marking the centenary of the development of X-ray crystallography by William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg at Leeds in 1912-13. He told an audience including academics from across the country, representatives of industry as well as staff and students of the University about his fight to prove the existence of “quasi-periodic” crystals in the face of sometimes aggressive criticism from senior figures in the scientific establishment. Quasi-periodic crystals violate the principle that all crystals have ordered and periodic structures. Some established chemists, including the two-times Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, refused to believe in their existence following Shechtman’s discovery in 1982. “[Professor Pauling] was saying Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense, there are no quasi-crystals, just quasi-scientists,” Professor Shechtman said. During what he described as “years of rejection,” he was ejected from one research group because the leader said he was a disgrace and his promotion to professor was actively obstructed.