Drive and curiosity

Well the book has a hell of a list of blurbers: Richard Zare, Paul Berg, Roald Hoffmann, plus a preface by Harry Kroto (who taught me when he was nobbut a mere lecturer at Sussex). I see Watson, Pauling, Teller and Gamow listed, and you say Schechtman too – can you list the other 10?

the well know issue of pos result bias rears its head again
what we don’t know is how many scientists pursued ideas taht everyone told them to drop, and the idea turned out to be wrong, and the scientist’s career was ruined.

Or, you could say those are the 3rd rate scientists, and we are better off without em

Howard whats his name at UC berkely, of ultracentrifuge fame, had a graph of originality on the x axis and funding probablty on the Y, and it was a U shaped curve

A nobelist from a few years ago, the guy in Wisconsin who figured out transfection of cells, explained on getting the nobel, that his grant for that idea was shot down, so he and a postdoc took another grant and used it for transfection…lucky for him, it worked

and, by the time Pauling was agin it, he was kinda loopy, touting Vitamin C for cancer

Truly game-changing discoveries in science are problematic. It requires an element of insanity because you must believe that what everyone else believes is wrong, and, simultaneously, you must be right. It’s the latter part that is a combination of luck and insight. This means, as pointed out in comment 3, that it is significantly subject to positive selection bias. It also means that you must be both iconoclastic and creative, a combination that often leads to being horribly wrong. Linus Pauling’s beliefs about Vitamin C are a great example.

Kent, here’s Wikipedia on quasicrystals and a nice article in the Guardian. Briefly, until Schechtman’s observation, crystals were only known to exhibit fairly simple symmetries, and it was thought there were good reasons why that should be so.

On Vitamin C: I learned only last Sunday that guinea pigs (and capybaras) also need supplemental ascorbic acid. For tropical herbivores or omnivores it’s evidently not terribly disadvantageous not to make their own, since it’s always present in their diet. It turns out that animals don’t need nearly as much as they manufacture, but it wasn’t completely unreasonable for Pauling to suppose otherwise.

I didn’t follow the quasicrystal business when it happened, but… isn’t it somewhat surprising, in retrospect, that Shechtman faced so much skepticism given that Penrose tilings had been known for more than a decade? I remember playing around with non-periodic tilings in the mid-seventies, and my boss at the time suggested computing the conduction states of a metallic film with ion cores at the vertices of a Penrose tiling– which would have revealed a mighty peculiar diffraction pattern.

kent – I can offer some speculation, but nothing first hand. If we had the book by Ingrid’s father maybe we could say more..

Penrose tilings were well known of course, but they had never been seen in real solids – and people had looked at a lot of solids. I do know (from graduate courses) that solid state physics and chemistry theory dealt entirely in periodic crystals, with theory of glasses being a niche side-topic, and that was it. The whole apparatus of solid state chemistry and physics, from the experimental techniques to mathematical group theoretical work, was based on periodic symmetry. So you can imagine that when someone says – “here, I’ve found a Penrose tiling kind of crystal” the first reaction would be to do the experiment again more closely.

The bit I know about electron diffraction or X-ray diffraction is that the experiments are difficult and the results often ambiguous (I can think of at least one case where a new phenomenon was proposed — called “bond length isomerism” — on the basis of crystallographic data, and a theory developed to explain it, only to have the experiments turn out to be wrong). I imagine the level of technique needed to establish these results was very demanding.

And once someone has proved there is one such structure, the knock on experiments (what other materials may generate these structures, what properties do they have) and theories (how do we do calculations on non-periodic structures; how do we interpret crystallographic data and more) would be numerous. Which is, of course, what gets scientists excited and what leads to prizes.

There may be a parallel with an earlier prize, for the discovery of fullerenes — a form of carbon with molecules like soccer balls. It’s not that no one had seen a soccer ball, or that no one had speculated about making carbon in that form, but seeing it in nature and finding ways to make it was a whole different ball game, pardon the pun, and was incredibly fruitful in terms of prompting further work.

So “the very nature of matter” does seem a bit of an overstatement, but I can see why it was a shocker.

ezra: thanks.

In #11: s/Ingrid/Eszter/. Sorry.