A material was discovered that, according to the science of the time, should not exist

Until the early 1980s, crystallographers were convinced that crystalline structures had to have rotational symmetry limited to specific values — never fivefold or tenfold — because such an arrangement of atoms couldn't repeat infinitely in a regular lattice.

In 1982, scientist Dan Shechtman observed a forbidden tenfold symmetry in a metal alloy — ordered, but never exactly repeating — something that, according to the theory of the time, was mathematically impossible.

The findings were initially met with sharp rejection from the scientific community, including public ridicule from one of the most respected chemists of the era — it took further, independent observations before science accepted the existence of what became known as quasicrystals.

The discovery eventually earned a Nobel Prize and reshaped the fundamental understanding of what ordered matter can even be — but research is still ongoing into exactly how such structures form in nature, since natural quasicrystals were later found in meteorites as well.