The Israeli academic Professor Dan Shechtman, 81, whose discovery of quasi crystals in 1982 earned him the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2011, has made it his mission in life to ensure science is taught in schools as early as possible. In line with this intention, he said he had persuaded the former mayor of Haifa, Yona Yahav, to underwrite science teaching in 60 kindergartens to children as young as five years old.
The exercise — which became wildly successful in Haifa, the home of Professor Shechtman’s university, the Technion — has attracted interest from around the world, particularly Lithuania, which sent a group of science professors from the capital, Vilnius, to monitor the initiative.
Professor Shechtman, who was in London earlier this month, told the JC about his discovery, which changed the previous assumptions about chemistry — and attracted mortal opposition from Linus Pauling, who was a Nobel winner for both chemistry and peace. Pauling, probably the best-known scientist in the world at the time of Shechtman’s findings, denounced the Israeli’s work whenever he could, telling one audience that “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense”.
Initially, Shechtman said, there was a great deal of opposition, in addition to that of Pauling. “But then over time it changed. Other people repeated my experiment and came to the same conclusion. And Pauling? Well, it got to the point that he could not publish any more and all his papers were rejected. People told him that [my work] was a fait accompli, he was fighting a lost battle”.
In the beginning, Shechtman said, “it was strange. But I knew that I was right. And then, I decided I liked the situation, because people asked what was going on [between him and Pauling]. At the end, I felt sorry for him. He did not deserve to be humiliated, as he was”.
The two met twice during 10 years of argument, once at a conference and the second time when Linus Pauling, then 90, invited Shechtman to his home in Palo Alto, California. Shechtman gave an hour-long lecture with slides about his discovery “to an audience of one. At the end he said, Dr Shechtman, I don’t know how you do that. Of course he didn’t know! And I said to him, Professor Pauling, if you ever agree with me, please don’t keep it a secret”.
The professor’s own interest in science began when he was a small child in Tel Aviv, when his grandfather gave him a magnifying glass and he “roamed the fields of Ramat Gan — yes, in those days there were still fields — looking at every small thing”. Aged seven, he was thrilled to try using a microscope in school; but, he said, he did not want to become a scientist.
Instead, he had been inspired by a children’s book by Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island, in which five young Americans are stranded. Their leader is an engineer “who could do everything. I wanted to be like him”. He was all set for a post-army career as an engineer until he “fell in love with science”, and took all his degrees at the Technion.
Professor Shechtman’s illustrious career hit a blip in 2014 when he unsuccessfully stood as Israeli president, receiving only one vote. He told the JC he had failed to realise that nearly all presidents were former politicians and that the Knesset was unlikely to vote in to office anyone outside that circle.
Nevertheless, he said, he remained on good terms with all the presidents, not least because he chairs the council for the prestigious Wolf Prize, an annual award given to outstanding scientists and artists from around the world. The awards are usually announced from the Israeli president’s residence.
Later, Baroness Deech, the recipient of this year’s Technion Churchill Award, gave a trenchant address in which she declared that young people in Britain were being “indoctrinated into hating our own values and history”.
As a long-time admirer of Churchill, Lady Deech, an academic, lawyer, bioethicist and active member of the House of Lords, told a 300-strong dinner audience that she had been “dismayed” to find that the wartime prime minister’s statue in London required constant guarding, and that 38 per cent of young people wanted it removed.
There was hatred, she said, for “our millennia-old British life of tolerance — and, of course, the teaching that everything white is rotten and oppressive.” Noting that there was “irrational” hatred of Israel on some of Britain’s campus, the baroness declared: “Youth are being deprived of the truth. Not by authoritarian government, but by propagandists, in whose interests it is to suppress it. In the name of Churchill, we should liberate people from the woke and prejudiced propaganda that they are getting, that will prevent them from ever fighting for the right causes again, unless we open up their minds”.
Baroness Deech, former principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, added that she was dismayed “by the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel prejudice to be found in our society, especially among students, and it is creeping into Jewish students’ own views. They may feel that to be accepted they have to give ground, or make statements about not liking the Netanyahu government”.
She observed: “We enjoy our freedom here because Israeli youth are on the front line. Who am I, who are any of us, to tell the Israeli government what to do, when it’s not our children fighting, and when we don’t live there and vote”.
