Heroes Not Zombies

You should never believe a scientist who claims to be certain about what is possible and what is not possible. For most of the 20th Century physicists believed that crystals could only have certain structures (based on their “rotational symmetry”). In fact, until 1982 they claimed that is would be impossible for a crystal to have a structure based on a five-fold pattern (like a pentagon). Then in 1982 somebody discovered the “impossible” – a crystal which had exactly that structure. As is often the case in science, once one had been discovered several others then turned up (you only see what you can see!). These structures were given a new name “quasicrystals”. Now, mathematicians are beginning to understand these strange materials –

“Mathematically speaking, quasicrystals fall into a middle ground between order and disorder,” Damanik said. “Over the past decade, it’s become increasingly clear that the mathematical tools that people have used for decades to predict the electronic properties of materials will not work in this middle ground.”

This is such an interesting comment – the “middle ground between order and disorder”. Finding patterns in apparent chaos is always somehow exciting. But for me, this story has another interesting element. There’s a kind of arrogance in many scientists which is the arrogance of certainty. Any scientists who stands up and declares that either all that can be known about a subject is already known, or that anything which does not fit our current understanding is just impossible, will, time and again, be proven wrong!