Sailing against the wind

John Petit-Senn told “True courage is like a kite, a contrary wind raises it higher”. To have a firm belief in something and to pursue it courageously till the end is one of the finest human qualities. This quality was exemplified by Daniel Shechtman, who recently won the Nobel prize in chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals. According to conventional knowledge of crystallography, crystals can exist with certain symmetries only. So the convention was that crystals in nature can have only 1-, 2-, 3-, 4- or 6-fold rotational symmetry, with everything else not allowed. Contrary to this, Daniel discovered that there exist crystals whose rotational symmetry is 10 fold. When he announced this discovery, he was mocked and humiliated, and was asked to leave his sabbatical research group. Great scientists including Linus Pauling made fun of the discovery on quasicrystals saying “There are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientist”. However, Daniel pursued his research and submitted it to Journal of Applied Physics, but was rejected. Yet he persuaded his colleagues in different countries to verify his discovery and finally his paper was published in Physical Review letters. This speaks of Daniel’s character of persistence and how he believed in his observations and finally triumphed. Nowadays everybody approves of quasicrystal’s existence, and Nobel prize is a fair indicator.

[A word of caution: all great research will not fetch the Nobel prize, and some of the deserving scientist may have been omitted in the past for various reasons. Who gets this prize, they usually deserves it, but the one who misses it should not be forgotten.]

What is related to this matter of persistence is that there have been plenty of scientific discoveries in the past that was initially rejected by the scientific community, but later went on to win the Nobel prize. A search on internet resulted in an interesting paper by a Spanish researcher named JUAN MIGUEL CAMPANARIO who wrote on Rejecting and resisting Nobel class discoveries: accounts by Nobel Laureates, in Scientometrics, Vol. 81, No. 2 (2009) 549–565. There he notes how more than 20 discoveries which were rejected ina journal were later accepted either in a different journal or in the same journal, and further went on to win the Nobel prize.

So the next time when you make a discovery and if somebody rejects it, you know what to do !