10/5/11

Iowa State University Professor Wins Nobel!

In my Classical Physics II class, we took a day to talk about superconductors. Fascinating stuff. But on this one slide in the presentation we see this pretty picture:


So apparently this guy named Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry today. This is kind of a big deal, because how many people do you know from Iowa State who has won a Nobel Prize? He apparently won it for discovering quasicrystals. I have absolutely no idea what quasicrystals are, and reading a Wikipedia article on the topic did not help in the least. I'm pretty sure you could win a Nobel for just coming up with the word.

Here's a more informed article if you're interested: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/science/06nobel.html.

Or if you're really brave, here's Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal.

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