I thought you ladies might be interested in this thread. After you visit maybe you can then explain it to me. :-)
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2011/info_publ_eng_2011.pdf
It’s absolutely fascinating, dear Mind-numbed Robot, thanks for the ping!
LOLOL dear MNR!!! Jeepers, I'm not a crystallographer, and have zero experience with experimentation by electron microscope!
Still, on the basis of the link you provided, it seems that conventional science has admitted the possibility of only certain symmetries in nature, topping out at six-fold symmetries. But I wonder whether there can be any x-fold symmetry, where 360 divided by x yields a positive integer. Shechtman's 10-fold symmetry would meet this test, the integer being 36. (But a 7-fold symmetry would not; the division produces a non-integer, 51.4285714.)
Just a speculation here....
Truly fascinating to me is the relevance of the Fibonnaci series and the golden ratio (tau) of mathematics to both quasicrystals and aperiodic mosaics. This tells me that fundamentally, real existing things "reduce" to mathematics. That is, the structural order of the world is, at bottom, mathematical/geometric.
Which would support the ancient idea of "God, Geometer." The etymology of the word "geometer" goes back to the ancient Greek, denoting "measurer of the Earth."
It turns out that these aperiodic quasicrystals that were assumed not to exist actually constitute valuable new materials that we now use in daily life (i.e., Teflon).
But for me, the main takeaway of the article is summed up very well in the final paragraph: "...even our greatest scientists [e.g., Linus Pauling] are not immune to getting stuck in convention. Keeping an open mind and daring to question established knowledge may in fact be a scientist’s most important character traits."
Amen to that!
Thank you so much, dear MNR, for the fascinating link!