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Dan Shechtman Wins Chemistry Nobel For Quasicrystals
Stirling Newberry writes with word that Dan Shechtman of Israel's Technion has won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals, and provides a short description of why quasicrystals are exciting:
"Quasicrystals fill space completely, but do not repeat, even though they show self-similar patterns, the way pi has order, but doesn't repeat. That is, they tessellate in an ordered way, but do not have repeating cells. In art, Girih tiles showed the essential property of being able to cover an infinite space, without repeating. In mathematics, Hao Wang came up with a set of tiles that any Turing Machine could be represented by, and conjectured that they would eventually always repeat. He turned out to be wrong, and over the next decades, tiles that did not repeat, but showed order, were discovered, most famously, though not first, by Penrose. Physically, when x-rays diffract, that is are scattered, from a crystal, they form a discrete lattice. Quasicrystals also have an ordered diffraction pattern, and it tiles the way ordered non-repeating tiles do. Quasicrystal patterns were known before Shechtman labelled them. So why care? Because crystals have only certain symmetries, and that determines their physical properties. Quasicrystals can have different symmetries, and do not bind regularly, and so different physical properties – which means new kinds of materials. Some examples: highly ductile steel, and, in something that is a bit of a by-word among people who study them, cooking utensils."
Because the people who award them want to be almost-completely-sure it's legit after they gave a guy a prize for discovering "the parasite that causes cancer" in the 20s. This is why most Nobel prizes tend to be for stuff that's been happening for years.
You're missing the fractional dimensionality clause and the part about being self-similar at different scales... your description applies to pretty much any lattice not just fractals.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This must not be the same committee that decides who gets a Peace prize, you know, like in 2009.
You know, like, maybe it isn't.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This must not be the same committee that decides who gets a Peace prize, you know, like in 2009.
It's not. According to the will of Alfred Nobel the Peace prize is administered in Norway which at the time of his death was in a forced union with Sweden.
The specifics to why he made this decision is unclear but the Norwegian Nobel Committee speculates that Nobel may have considered Norway better suited to awarding the prize, as it did not have the same militaristic traditions as Sweden.
Quasicrystals look like they can be used for a lot of interesting things. They have interesting thermal and conductive properties.
But they have nothing to do with space elevators. These don't have the desired properties for that all. But we already have substances that do have the desired properties, carbon nanotubes. We need to figure out how to make them in large enough quantities in high enough quality. This is really tough. There's good news in that nanotubes are useful for lots of things, so there's already steady research in nanotube manufacturing for lots of uses other than space elevators. But is unlikely that we will see a space elevator any time soon.
Is it because since the patterns NEVER repeat so it is impossible (or extremely unlikely) for two surfaces to "lock" together?
I was thinking the same thing. If lack of periodicity is a key, would a metallic glass have the same non-stick properties as a quasi-crystal metal? Well, did some Googling and found this: Lunac 1 Metallic Glass coating.
So, I think there's a connection.
The cooking utensil link isn't very useful, however apparently the deal is that the coating is non-stick, quite hard (thus doesn't wear out like Teflon) and can handle high heat.
when ever they try to get these crystals, the sleestak show up.
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