ABSTRACT
An ongoing fascination at Aranda\Lasch is the strange story of quasicrystals. A quasicrystal is a material structure that hovers on the edge of falling apart. Unlike a regular crystal, whose molecular pattern is periodic (or repetitive in all directions), the distinctive quality of a quasicrystal is that its structural pattern never repeats the same way twice. It is endless and uneven, but interestingly, can be described by the arrangement of a small set of modular parts. The tilework on a medieval Islamic mosque in Iran displays the earliest known example of a quasi-crystalline tiling motif a full five centuries before the pattern's underlying mathematics are understood in the West. The material scientist Dan Shechtman discovers a new type of synthetic solid-state matter, the icosahedral phase. Like a regular crystal, it consists of densely packed molecules, but unlike a regular crystal, its structural pattern displays a remarkable character: it never repeats the same way twice.
