Does this treatment sound familiar?

jaymam says:
October 5, 2011 at 5:28 pm
The names of the people who gave Dr. Shechtman a hard time and ridiculed him, should be published as a lesson for others who are wrong.
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I was thinking just that … their names should be published and their apologies should be recorded. Those that cannot find the words to apologise should be ostrasized by the scientific community.

Probably 20 years ago, I attended a seminar given by Linus Pauling on the quasicrystal controversy. He talked about attempting to solve the structure of “sodium cadmide” as a graduate student, somewhere around 1922. He said he gave up when he determined that the basic repeating unit had, as I recall, about 22,000 atoms in it. They solved crystal structures by hand-calculation in those days. 🙂
Computers, of course, eventually came to his aid. As I recall, he said he managed to index the structure as a twinned crystal form. A twinned crystal means there are two interpenetrating lattices (repeating arrangements of atoms) in one solid. Sodium cadmide is an alloy of the minimal formula, Na2Cd. It’s quasicrystaline. Pauling was able to index it as a twinned crystal using ordinary space group symmetry, which excludes the 5-fold symmetry of quasicrystals. The problem everyone had, including Pauling, in conceiving 5-fold symmetry crystal lattices was that it’s impossible to fill a space or volume with a repeating solid of 5-fold symmetry. Try tiling perfect pentagons, if you’d like to see for yourself. Crystalline solids, of course, fill a volume with a repeating 3D unit.
During the question period after Pauling’s seminar, another researcher stood up and said he could also index the material as a quasicrystal, using the expanded dimensionality that quasicrystalline theory introduced. Pauling reasonably replied that there’s no point to expanded dimensionality when ordinary symmetry plus twinning would do. At the time, as I recall, the explanation for quasicrystals was that they followed ordinary symmetry in a higher dimension that manifested itself in three dimensions as 5-fold order. I remember thinking at the time that Pauling had a point in rejecting this idea. After all, atoms crystallize in 3 dimensions, no more than that.
It was my impression that Pauling objected to this higher-dimensional aspect to the explanation as an unnecessary addition to theory, not to the existence of apparently quasicrystalline materials or to the overall icosahedral (5-fold) symmetry they demanded.
The debate wasn’t really resolved until about 1997, several years after Pauling’s death. As it turned out, the few known true quasicrystals have what’s appropriately called quasi-periodicity, meaning that the basic unit only approximately repeats itself as one translates through the crystal. Smaller subunits of the structure have the 5-fold symmetry, but the solid accommodates the impossibility of close-packing these units by giving up on perfect long-range order of the pure repetition of unit cells that are characteristic of a true crystalline solid. In 1997, the IUCr (International Union of Crystallography) went so far as to redefine a crystal, as ““any solid having an essentially discrete diffraction diagram,” and an aperiodic crystal as “any crystal in which 3D lattice periodicity can be considered to be absent.”” Quasicrystals are aperiodic solids that nevertheless exhibit diffraction.
So, the reality is always more complicated than the common story. Pauling wasn’t being an irrational hard-bar in taking his critical stance. He was able to index some of the materials in terms of his standard model, which objectively supported his view. He published at least 15 peer-reviewed papers on his work.
It’s just that nature turned out to be more complicated than Pauling thought. Schectman had real data and his data were right. There was a new way for atoms to arrange themselves in diffraction-producing solids, and he really did discover a new phase of matter. So, the early debate was critical and necessary, and typical of what does go on (except for climate science), and should go on, in science. The ad hominems and personal attacks were clearly wrong. They are a sign that scientists themselves don’t consciously keep before themselves the high likelihood that nature is more complicated than they know. Call this trait foolish arrogance when it stoops to personal denigration. Schechtman surely had courage in carrying on in the face of ad hominem dismissals, and definitely opened a big new door.
It was interesting that Paul Bishop faced similar criticisms in the 1980’s when he first published his results pointing to an alternative bacterial enzyme that fixed atmospheric nitrogen. It contained vanadium instead of the standard molybdenum, and his first work was widely dismissed as an artifact. But he persisted and eventually proved himself right and his critics wrong. Since then, there have turned out to be two alternative systems, with the third enzyme containing iron. It’s all now accepted science. Many nitrogen-fixing bacterial carry genes for all three enzymes, so that they can survive in environments that are impoverished in the more exotic metals.
So, the failing of arrogant foolishness is not missing among scientists either, who after all are also only human. Fortunately, along with others of their species, courage is also manifest among scientists: Dan Schectman, Paul Bishop, Roy Spencer, Dick Lindzen.