If the Physics Nobel went for a metaphysical theory weakly supported by data, the Chemistry Nobel went for strongly supported data that undermined a bad metaphysical theory. The two prizes could not have been more different than night and day.

First let's try to understand the metaphysics that underpins chemistry, and its subtle message about materialist reductionism. (I'm a physicist, so I'm bound to get the nuance wrong since I don't work in a chemistry, but I had organic chem in college and a course on solid state physics taught by a crystallographer in grad school, and since the topic of the Nobel is crystallography, I thought at least I'd get the physics right.) Let's start with the history.

Now as the Medieval synthesis of Aristotle and Aquinas began to crumble in the Renaissance, the Greek atomism of Democritus and Epicurus began to gain a hearing. Long before physicists would believe in the metaphysical atom (which being unobservable remained a ideal, not a datum), the chemists were finding that chemical reactions had specific amounts: two parts hydrogen plus one part oxygen = water. Whether or not atoms existed, chemistry was most easily explained as the reaction of individual atoms. Later on, physicists found that the gas laws of Charles and Boyle could be best explained by atoms, Maxwell even found velocity distributions for these atoms, and Boltzmann demonstrated that statistics on these atoms could explain all of thermodynamics.

The metaphysics was clear--all of life was reducible to smaller units so that the macroscopic behavior was merely the accumulation of microscopic behavior. Once atoms were recognized, then all the ways to arrange them were tabulated into 7 crystal systems of 32 point groups. Now when you picked up a rock you had never seen before, you could classify it with the exhaustive classification scheme because you knew it was made of atoms. The power in this knowledge was the power of atomism, of reductionism, of a correct metaphysical view of reality. Later on when glass was found not to be crystalline, one made a special exemption for "amorphous" or "glassy" solids that, we were told, were just extremely viscous liquids. But the difference between the categories was clear, crystals had order, liquids did not.

Now this introduces a very old chestnut into the intelligent design community. Since a crystal had order, but was not designed, how does one distinguish between that and the real ID? The answer came back that the order was not very informative. The NaClNaClNaCl repitition in a salt crystal didn't have much complexity. In fact, we could compress the formula easily (NaCl)_n where n is the number of times we need to repeat. This led to the idea of Kolmogorov Complexity, which is the length of the formula or algorithm necessary to duplicate the object. Obviously a crystal could be compressed to a very short string, as we did above.

Well then, what about glass? If we can't crystallize it or compress it to a formula, then does it have more information than salt? In this case we say that it is highly disordered. No two samples of glass will have atoms in exactly the same place, only the average composition can be known. For example, when we send neutrons or x-rays diffracting through glass, they don't form the patterns that crystals form, they don't have strongly peaked Fourier components of a periodic structure. Imagine that atoms were an orchestra, then crystals would be Mozart and glass would be Bartok. That's what these diffraction experiments revealed, that glass had no long range order. It had no information.

In contrast to this inorganic chemistry, living biology was far harder to characterize. For one thing, many organic molecules just resisted crystallization the way honey stays liquid in your pantry. But it obviously wasn't random either. Was there any way that living things could occupy a space between liquids and crystals, being full of information yet not compressed to simple algorithms? The biologists were happy to give information to their enzymes, but the chemists weren't too sure. Everything orderly comes down to those 7 crystal systems, they would say, and there's less information in a liquid than in a crystal. So don't you go trying to explain life as an information rich crystal. (Cue to Dawkins Ruse claiming life began on the backs of crystals.)

In contrast to this reductionist approach to atoms, mathematicians were already exploring systems that didn't fit those 7 crystal systems. The one I recall most vividly was Roger Penrose's tiles that could make 5-fold "flower" crystals but had no repeating units. That is, none of those 7 crystal systems could have 5-fold symmetry, as any crystallographer would explain, because you just can't find a way to tile a surface with pentagons. Hexagons, squares, triangles, yes, pentagons, no. But Penrose tiles do make lovely 5-fold stars and flowers, but without any repeating units. Why is that?

The chemists were adamant. Whatever Penrose does with his tiles, is not possible with atoms.

Well, why not? Aren't tiles made out of atoms after all?

Because such a system would have no repeating pattern, yet still have an overall pattern. It would have long-range order without short-range order. And if we allow those kinds of objects into our world, then humans would not be reducible to interactions of atoms, but would have long-range order that perhaps made them respond to thoughts and emotions and objects on the other side of the universe. That was what Aristotle and Aquinas were promoting! Remember the 4 elements? The reason rocks sink in water is that they are "seeking their own kind" and the reason fire rises in air is it too is "seeking its kind" meaning the sun and the aurora. It was this sort of "spooky-action-at-distance" that assigned purpose and intent and function to inanimate things like rocks and fire that was precisely what the atomist theory was meant to eliminate. Read Lucretius on the need to reduce everything to atoms to remove any affect of the gods on earthly phenomena.

Not only did everything have to reduce to atoms, but all the interactions had to reduce to collisions between atoms. It doesn't get any more local than that. We have doodles of Descartes' trying to show that the planets move, not because they were set in motion like Aristotle, but because little whirlpools of atoms filling the heavens were colliding with them and pushing them along.

Of course gravity didn't fit that model. It really was spooky-action-at-a-distance, but Newton pled the fifth, "hypotheses non fingo" he said and refused to elaborate. And then Faraday started spouting off about electric and magnetic fields, but fortunately theoretical physicists tamed all these spooky things by claiming they are mediated by particles. Sorry, I got carried away with the physics again.

So in a nutshell, the atomic theory of matter is strongly coupled with the local force interaction theory of matter. If we allow atoms to possess long-range forces, then it would appear we are allowing Aristotle and Aquinas a foothold. In biology, this comes down to a Darwinist theory that will not allow organisms to forsee the future and plan their reproduction accordingly. Just as there can be no planning in Darwinism, there can be no global or long-range interactions in chemistry. That was the metaphysical requirement, and the barrier that separated chemistry from biology. Biology is all about apparent purpose, chemistry is all about local reactions, local equilibria that have no purpose.

Then along comes Shechtman. And he had no commitment to the metaphysics of materialism. If long-range order exists and he finds it, he is going to report it. And if five-fold symmetry is observed, then it will be evidence for the long-range order, since there is no way to include it in the 7 crystal systems. He published that paper in 1984 and you would have thought he had reported being abducted by aliens.

The doorkeepers of the journals, the guardians of the metaphysics were not going to allow such heresy. Twenty-seven long years later, we find who won that battle.

But what exactly does it mean that interactions are non-local? It means that quantum mechanics is closer to reality than Democritus' atoms. It means that people are not merely made up of atoms, but atoms carefully arranged by some external force. It means that experiments are not isolated from the universe, but always under the influence of things far away. It means that integer dimensions do not capture reality, but we live in fractional spaces, in fractal geometries that have information at all scales from the galaxy down to the subatomic nucleus. It means that no man is an island, no man stands alone. If ever there was a rebuttal of materialism, if ever there were a way to convince a Darwinist that he can never recover the reductionist purposeless of Darwin, it would be this Nobel prize.

How does this Nobel impact on ID?

It hardly says that crystals are now an intelligently designed inanimate object, but it does say that the geometry of space is intelligently designed. Rather than elevating crystals to the level of consciousness, it demonstrates the incompleteness, the utter poverty of space and time in which materialism disrespects the geometry of nature. Rather than a Maginot Line between information rich Biology and information poor Chemistry, there is now an entire world, an infinite spectrum of places to tuck in information. Today we are reading the message in the genome, tomorrow we will be reading the message in the quasi-crystals.

We truly live in the Information Age.