A Nobel laureate called him a 'quasi-scientist' — until he won a Nobel Prize himself

In 1982, Dan Shechtman found a metal alloy whose atoms formed a pattern textbooks said was mathematically impossible: ordered, but never repeating. Colleagues mocked him and had him removed from his research group; two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling insisted 'there are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.' Shechtman was proven right and won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone.

— Dan Shechtman et al., Metallic Phase with Long-Range Orientational Order and No Translational Symmetry — Physical Review Letters, 1984; Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2011