Quasiperiodic Crystals: A Revolution in Crystallography

At the beginning of my career, I encountered a book that Professor Von Hippel edited. In the Preface to that book he wrote the following: “Many foresee that science and industry are building a Tower of Babel and thai this undertaking will be halted as in Biblical times: the laborers, more and more specialized, will finally cease to understand each other. The editor, for one, does not share this is gloomy conviction. On the contrary, as our knowledge grows, old boundaries vanish and the view expands to broader horizons. However, people accustomed to boundaries in certain places tend still to respect them after their actual disappearance. To make them feel at home with their new neighbors is a driving motive of this book and its companion volume.”The Materials Research Society, being dedicated to interdisciplinariness, has shared Prof. Von Hippel's optimism, and I hope that in this lecture I can give you a small inkling of how interdisciplinary our current research is and how many different fields it touches.The work that I am going to discuss resulted from the rapid solidification study of aluminum transition metal alloys. One day more than three years ago. Prof. Shechtman, who is the hero of this investigation, came into my office with an electron diffraction picture with ten spots arrayed about the central spots (Figure 1).