Dan Shechtman Quotes
Let us advance science to create a better world for all.
Shechtman, Dan. "Banquet Speech." Nobel Banquet, 10 Dec. 2011, Stockholm City Hall, Stockholm. NobelPrize.org, Nobel Prize Outreach AB, 2011.
This speech was given in the early days of WWII when it was far from clear that we would win.
While this is generally true, from the scientific point of view, it is not quite right. The layman and most engineers believe that scientists discover things that exist. Although they do most of the time, breakthrough’s of the last century have for example discovered new chemical elements, but there are a few that science has CREATED—they exist nowhere in nature. Scientists are beginning to develop new life forms as well as discovering already existing ones. For over a century now the science of metallurgy has created thousands of alloys that did not previously exist.
Dan Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Shechtman discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. Shechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals, making him one of six Israelis who have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
