In April 1982, Shechtman spotted an odd atomic arrangement through his electron microscope at Johns Hopkins University: A crystal of aluminium and manganese arranged with pentagonal symmetry. It was thought to be impossible - five sides do not a perfectly repeatable structure make. The laws of nature held that the atoms in a solid could be arranged in an amorphous, blob-like pattern, or organised with symmetrical periodicity into crystals. Shechtman saw something that fit neither category.
His research was "extremely controversial," as the Nobel Assembly put it today. He told his colleagues what he'd seen and they laughed him off, he said in an interview earlier this year. He was eventually asked to leave his research group for "bringing disgrace" to its members, he told the Ha'aretz in April.