On April 8, 1982, I was alone in the electron microscope room when I discovered the Icosahedral Phase that opened the field of quasi-periodic crystals.
I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me.
The frontiers of science, on the very small scale and very large scale, require large investments and international effort.
The good news is world population growth rate decreases systematically and is expected to reach zero by 2050, thanks to urbanisation and women's education.
Crystallographers believed in X-ray results, which are of course very accurate. But the x-rays are limited, and electron microscopy filled the gap, and so the discovery of quasicrystals could have been discovered only by electron microscopy, and the community of crystallographers, for several years, was not willing to listen.
My childhood dream was to study mechanical engineering. After reading 'The Mysterious Island' - which I read 25 times as a boy - I thought that was the best thing a person could do. The engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that.
