This year 's Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to an Israeli scientist who `` fought a fierce battle against established science '' and `` fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter , '' the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Wednesday . Daniel Shechtman `` tore apart what we thought we knew about crystals , '' a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said . Shechtman discovered that crystals do not have to have a regular repeating pattern , Peter Mueller said , comparing the revelation to the fall of the Berlin Wall . `` There are a few things that you know in life , like 'The Berlin Wall is not going to fall . ' That was one of things that I knew growing up in Germany , '' Mueller said . Shechtman 's discovery in 1982 was as disruptive to chemistry as the fall of the wall was to world politics , Mueller said . The very definition of a crystal was that it was `` periodic , '' or that its molecules were packed together in a regular , repeating way . `` Dan Shechtman comes along and proves us all wrong , '' said Mueller . `` It 's the next step in crystallography . It is outrageous . It is fantastic . Before Dr. Shechtman 's discovery , this was thought impossible . It absolutely deserves the Nobel . '' Shechtman is a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology . His discovery is called quasicrystals . Unlike other crystals , quasicrystals do not have a repeating pattern at the molecular level . They are very hard , but break easily , like glass . Interestingly , the structure of quasicrystals seems to have been foreshadowed in medieval Islamic art that contradicts what Western geometry had always taught . `` If you want to tile a bathroom floor with squares , you can do it out to infinity , '' said Peter J. Lu , a post-doctorate researcher at Harvard University who has studied Islamic tile work . `` If you want to do it with five-sides figures , there are gaps , '' he explained . But Islamic artists figured out how to do it without leaving gaps by making the pattern irregular rather than repeating -- the same thing that happens in quasicrystals , he said . `` Aperiodic mosaics , such as those found in the medieval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra Palace in Spain and the Darb-i Imam Shrine in Iran , have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level , '' the Swedish academy said . Islamic tile patterns dating back to the early 1400s were put together in ways not understood in the West until 1973 , Lu and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University argued in a paper in 2007 in the journal Science . The Muslim artists discovered ways to tile shapes with five , 10 or 12 shapes without leaving gaps between them -- a structure thought by standard geometry to be impossible . British mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose explained in 1973 how it was done , and just over a decade later the same pattern was found at the molecular level in quasicrystals , according to a report in Lu and Steinhardt 's work in the journal Nature in 2007 . Lu said he was `` thrilled to pieces '' that Shechtman had won the prize . `` The discovery was incredibly monumental , and he 's just the nicest guy , '' Lu said . Mueller , a principle research scientist at MIT , said he was `` fascinated '' by the structure of quasicrystals , even as he admitted he would not have the knowledge to analyze them himself . But specialists in quasicrystals will eventually `` gain knowledge of some structures which we can not analyze with conventional methods , '' he predicted . The academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Chemistry said quasicrystals have a `` unique atomic structure '' which makes them `` bad conductors of heat and electricity , and ( they ) have nonstick surfaces . '' `` Their poor thermal transport properties may make them useful as so-called thermoelectric materials , which convert heat into electricity , '' the academy said . The prize in chemistry is worth 10 million Swedish kronor ( about $ 1.44 million ) . On Tuesday , the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named Saul Perlmutter from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California , Berkeley ; Brian P. Schmidt of Australian National University and Adam G. Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute , the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics . They made the discovery that our universe apparently is expanding at an accelerating rate some 14 billion years after the Big Bang . The Nobel committee on Monday named Ralph Steinman , a biologist with Rockefeller University , and scientists Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann , the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine . The announcement came three days after Steinman died of pancreatic cancer at age 68 . This week , the committee also will announce prizes in literature and peace . The prize in economics will be announced Monday .
Daniel Shechtman 's discovery was like the fall of the Berlin Wall , a scientist says . Shechtman `` tore apart what we thought we knew , '' Peter Mueller of MIT says . Islamic tile patterns hundreds of years old help explain the discovery . Comment: