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"..Schrödinger indicated two distinct ways of building bigger and bigger bodies out of a small embryo (not a very large molecule). One way is the relatively monotonous repetition again and again of one and the same structure in the three space directions. This is the way crystals grow. The other way is the building of an ever bigger aggregate without the dull mechanism of repetition. Such is the case of an increasingly complex molecule in which every single atom, every distinct group of atoms plays an individual role, different from that of another atom and group of atoms. Schrödinger called such formation aperiodic crystal. We could consider as an example of aperiodic crystal a single gene or even a whole chromosome thread. The description of organisms as aperiodic crystals means that they are systems of a high degree of order, similar to that of solids, but without a periodic arrayal of molecules and cells."
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2011 to Dan Shechtman Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel - "for the discovery of quasicrystals"
Quote: The discovery of these aperiodic forms in nature has produced a paradigm shift in the fields of crystallography. Quasicrystals had been investigated and observed earlier,[2] but, until the 1980s, they were disregarded in favor of the prevailing views about the atomic structure of matter.