Sometimes you're right and they're wrong.
Either you're crazy or the world is.
Being out of step with the world isn't a lot of fun.
But Dan Schectman, who claimed to have found a third and previously unaccounted for state of solid matter, and was ridiculed for it by Linus Pauling, has a different take on how this feels. The new state, which Shechtman calls 'quasi-crystal' drew from Pauling the acid retort that there were "no quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists."
"When you're a young scientist, and you're faced with perhaps the top international scientist, Professor Linus Pauling ... and he argues with you as an equal, and you know that he is wrong - that's not really such a bad feeling."
Scientists had previously thought solid matter had only two states -- crystalline, like diamonds, where atoms are arranged in rigid rows, and amorphous, like metals, with no particular order. Quasicrystalline matter offers a third possibility and opens the door to new kinds of materials for use in industry.
Dan Shectman won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry today for his 1982 discovery.
Sometimes it takes awhile for the bastards to catch on.
Why note this here?
I've represented people who were factually innocent against the might of the state with all its resources, and after long, difficult, and lonely work have seen them vindicated.
Why was my legal system so messed up that they couldn't see, I wondered.
Eventually, they had no choice but to see.
It's not so bad to have prevailed under such circumstances.
I write about it under the rubric of debunking false accusations by putting the investigation itself on trial.
I'm about ready to take the resulting slideshow on the road. Just have to cull out a few of the slides, always tough to do.
The Schectman quote, above, is from a Reuters news report out of Stockholm, home of the prize.
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