Raising a hat to quasicrystals

The award of the 2011 chemistry Nobel prize to Dan Shechtman for his discovery of quasicrystals was something of a surprise to many seasoned Nobel-watchers. Quasicrystals are one of those concepts that almost no non-scientists have heard about, and to many practising scientists is something on the edge of their awareness. Maybe they learned about it in a short section of a crystallography or solid-state physics course – or maybe not at all.