Modern Wisdom - #058 - Professor Paul Steinhardt - A New Kind Of Matter

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

Professor Paul Steinhardt is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Princeton University, Director of the Princeton Centre for Theoretical Science and an author. Despite Professor Steinhardt's resume reading like a scientist, today's story is closer to that of a crime detective novel than a research project. Join us on a rollercoaster tale as we travel across the world with Professor Steinhardt and his team in search of a new kind of matter. Expect to meet some crafty Russians, an old lady in Amsterdam, a Romanian man called Tim and an asteroid that no one ever new existed. More Stuff: The Second Kind Of Impossible - https://amzn.to/2CqhiQX Professor Steinhardt's Website - https://paulsteinhardt.org/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, my guest this week is Professor Paul Steinhart from Princeton University, and despite being a physicist, the roller coaster that we're taking on today reads and he is an awful lot more like a crime detective novel than like a typical science book. I'm not going to give away too much with regards to what Professor Steinhardt takes us through today. Suffice it to say that he's found a new type of matter, and went on a journey all over the world with the help of some crafty Russians, old lady in Amsterdam, a Romanian man called Tim and an awful lot of other characters. It genuinely does sand and hear like something out of the Da Vinci code, but it's real life and it culminates in discovering an asteroid

that no one has ever found before and a type of matter that literally no one knew existed. So yeah, enjoy this. It's a mind-blower. Professor Steinhardt, how are you today? Welcome to Modern Wisdom. Hi Chris, it's a pleasure to be here. Absolutely, fantastic to have you on. You're in good company. Some of your colleagues from across the US have been unrecently. Well, I'm happy to be part of the crew. You are indeed. So what are we learning about today?

Well, I thought we might talk about the discovery of a new form of matter, which I've written about in a recent book, it just came out, Simon and Schuster, it's called The Second Kind of Impossible. And in one sense, it's a science story about this new form of matter that people once thought was impossible. They thought for thought was impossible. They thought for centuries was impossible. But it has a lot of other aspects to the story. It's one of the stranger scientific stories you're likely to come across. Wow. So a new kind of matter.

Yes. So there's always been this question about what ways exist for atoms and molecules to come together to make a piece of matter. How they arrange themselves is very important to how they behave, how that matter behaves, and what it's useful for. It depends partly on the particular kinds of atoms, the chemistry, what particular combination of elements you have, but it also depends upon how they're arranged. So for example, we can take carbon, if you arrange it one way, it makes diamond. And if you arrange the atoms another way, it makes graphite. The first, of course, is transparent and hard. The second is very soft and dark. And it's the same carbon chemistry, but just a different arrangement.

And so that's been a prime issue in science. What are the different ways mathematically and physically atoms and molecules can come together? And we thought this subject was entirely settled by the 1980s. In fact, it was settled mostly in 19th century science. But what the book is about is how we were wrong, how what we once thought was impossible actually is possible. And then it goes on to talk about a strange adventure that that led to. That sounds absolutely fascinating. So what are the, or what were the established understandings of the ways that matter could form?

Well, the ways that atoms can come together, it was thought, are very much like the ways you might encounter if you were trying to say, tile your shower floor. Okay, so, let's suppose you were trying to tile your shower floor, and I gave you a bunch of squares. I think you're pretty confident you could tell your shower floor with squares, with just leaving little space for ground in between, but they would fit together nicely. You could also imagine and you might even have hexagons, or you might have rectangles, or you might have triangles, and you might have thought there were an infinite number of possible

shapes I could provide you with. But actually, there's only a finite number of a handful that are possible if you were tiling your floor. If I gave you perfect pentagons and by a perfect pentagon, I mean all the sides of the same length and all the angles are the same. And I asked you the top and I gave a bunch of those to you to tile your floor. You might be somewhat embarrassed to find that it was difficult to put them together without leaving spaces in between. Oh, no. That wouldn't be very good for your shower. No.

And then you might wonder, is that impossible to do or is it just that you weren't clever enough to figure out how to fit them together? In this case, it's what I would call the first kind of impossible, something that's truly is impossible, something that matter which way you put them together, you know from rigorous mathematics, there's no conceivable way they can make the symmetry, they can make a pattern that fills your floor without tiles or your floor without leaving spaces. I got that. So, as a beginning, one of the first discoveries that we found is that if someone gets their

bathroom refitted and the Tyler turns up with pentagon-shaped tiles, they've got a hook star on their hands. Exactly. Exactly. And the same thing already. That's right. And it's not just true for pentagons, the same would be true if they came with haptagons, sevenfold, or ninefold, or 11 11fold or 147fold. So there are really only five

basic possibilities that you can use. And almost every pattern that you have seen or humans have seen up until the 1980s are patterns based on those five possibilities because we thought anything else was impossible. But we were wrong. It turns out there's more ways to put, if you allow a little bit more freedom, there's more things you can do than that. But before we get to that, let me point out that this relates to the story of matter. Because matter forms clusters, arrangements of atoms and three dimensions, that fill space just like building blocks, children's building blocks, or just like tiles and two dimensions, and the same restrictions apply. If you ever had a building block which had the symmetry of a pentagon or pentagons in it,

then the rule said you couldn't have matter with that form either, that there were only a restricted set of possibilities. Why can't you have matter with that form? The same issue. When you try to fit them together, they won't fill space. And so Adam's hate having empty space. Their strong interatomic forces will rip apart the clusters and they'll make something else.

They'll arrange themselves into some form that we call a crystal form, an ordinary crystal form like quartz or salt or sugar. And they won't ever make a form which has call a crystal form, an ordinary crystal form like quartz or salt or sugar. And they won't ever make a form which has, let's say, fivefold facets, facets of a pentagon. So we know there are crystals that have facets which are six-sided and four-sided, perfect four-sided and perfect six-sided or three-sided,

but never, up until the 1980s, did we think it was possible to even put together atoms or molecules in a way that would have the symmetries of a pentagon. Gotcha. So, but there was, so it's, and all that could be shown rigorously mathematically, that is to say, it was the first kind of impossible. If you actually tried to build geometric building blocks in this way, you'll find that you can't. So that was accepted, and it seemed to agree with what we were finding in nature.

Nature seemed to reject all these forbidden possibilities as well. So it seemed like a nice, tight, complete subject. Nothing else to be said. Well, when the, when the theoreticians and the experimentalists all find themselves in the same camp, I guess you've got, you've got a pretty big weight of academia there pushing you towards one particular conclusion. Exactly. In fact, it would be on the first page of any book that you picked up on the theory of solids that said, here are symmet said, here are patterns which are allowed, shapes are allowed, and here are ones that are forbidden, and prime among the forbidden would be anything with the symmetry of a pentagon.

But there was a flaw in that thinking. And so, you know, when scientists say something is impossible, or at least when I'm listening as a scientist, and a scientist says something is impossible, that always sort of brings up the antenna. And I begin to wonder, which kind of impossible is it? Is it of this first kind, where it's absolutely rigorously impossible? Or is it possible that they've made some assumption? There's some assumption which they're not even aware of, something that everyone has been assuming for years, centuries,

but has not quite true and may have a loophole in it. If you can find the loophole, well, then you find something really interesting. You find something that everyone thought was impossible to be possible. So, in this case, my student, Devil of theine and I, back in the 1980s, discovered a loophole in this thinking. And it goes back to thinking about tiles and atoms. So when I asked you the question about tiling your bathroom, one thing which I slipped in there was I was only going to use one kind of shape. Now crystals, in fact, are all made of one kind of shape or building block. And that building block repeats just like

in a children's building blocks over and over again with equals spacing between the blocks. Okay. And all crystals are of that nature. But suppose I allow the possibility of two building blocks. And suppose I allow the possibility that they do not repeat in harmony with one another. It's not like shape one, shape two,

shape one, shape two, shape one, shape two, but I have shape one appear at one frequency or one rate, and shape two appear at a different rate where there are disharmonic or it's like an atonal sound, or a disharmony of sound, but this is like a disharmony in space. Then it turns out, what we showed is that all the rules about what's allowed and disallowed get broken. You can form shapes with symmetries and attilings now. You can fill your bathroom with those two shapes, the entire floor with a symmetry which has five full symmetry. And in fact, all the patterns that you thought were impossibly before an infinite number, literally an infinite number of them, are now possible in two dimensions and in three dimensions. So, if it's possible, then, well, maybe you can make it in the laboratory. That was the first question. It was theoretically possible, but maybe you can make it in the laboratory. And so we didn't have to wait very long to find the answer because it turned out a few

hundred miles to the south of us. At the same time that we were thinking of these radical ideas, there was a group led by a fellow by the name of Dan Schechmann at the National Bureau of Standards near Washington DC. And he had accidentally found a material that absolutely violated all the laws of matter that people had learned for centuries. In particular, it had symmetries, it had patterns with fiefold symmetry and could, in principle, make shapes with fiefold or pent Pentagon-shaped facets. He didn't know what to make of it. He just knew it was somehow wrong, but he didn't have a theory to explain it.

The theory was being developed a few hundred miles to the north, and we didn't even know about each other at the time. But he wrote, he and his colleagues wrote a paper, we call a preprint, sort of pre-publication version of this paper, sent it to a colleague that I had known for many years, so I'd worked with in the past.

The colleague didn't know what I was doing, but he knew I was interested in shapes generally, and he showed up one day in my office, and he said, oh, I have something to show you. I said, I have something to show you, because I wanted to learn to eat patterns. Yeah, and it was kind of, you know, we kind of argued a little bit,

but since he was the visitor, I said, okay, you go first. And he showed me this paper, and it was like amazing, because by the time you got to section two or three of the paper, what it showed was a pattern that you get that they got by shining electrons to this material and seeing the pattern they produced after they passed the material. We call this kind of pattern an electron diffraction pattern. It's kind of a fingerprint that tells you how the atoms and molecules are organized, whether they are well organized or randomly organized, and also the shape, the

shape that they're forming. And it showed a very distinctive pattern that violated the centuries-old rules of crystallography. But I didn't say a thing because all I had to do was go up to my desk because on my desk was a calculation that my student, Doug, and I had done of what you'd expect the diffraction to be for a quasi-gristle. I just picked it up and put the paper next to the pattern, And they were, you know, to the level one could tell by eye the same. So that's so much serendipity as well. It's hilarious that it was someone who turned up in your office during the process that you guys were going through as well.

Yes, because we had, we had been holding back our idea because when I'd been showing it to people, they thought, oh, that's kind of interesting, curious, but useless because matter will never make this form. And then by accident, someone did. Is there an asymmetry there between the theoreticians and the experimentalists a little bit? If you've got something that's tacit and kind of appears in real life, that there's some more weight to it in the scientific community, then I guess you've got something that's tacit and kind of appears in real life, that there's some more weight to it in the scientific community, then I guess you've got the fear of presenting a theory, and then it being turned out to be complete bollocks when it becomes real life.

Yes, I mean, especially in this field, in the field of, you know, studying different forms of matter like this, it's very important that you don't just have a hypothetical idea, a imaginative idea. Certainly important for everyone that I presented the idea up to that point. It was important that you could actually occur in nature, because at first these patterns look complex until you get used to them.

It's hard to see, in fact, if I show you the pattern, it's a little hard to see what's going on in the pattern. But as you come used to it, it begins to have a simplicity, but that's still not the same as showing that it actually has real physical relevance that you can actually make this in the laboratory. So we call this, just like the ordinary, ordinary, ordered forms of matter where you have regular repeating-building blocks. We call those crystals. We call these new form of matter where you have regular repeating building blocks. We call those crystals.

We call these new form of matter quasi crystals. Quasi because when you have patterns that are composed of two or more elements that have repeated disharmonic frequencies, mathematicians call that quasi periodic and they call crystals periodic. So we called ours quasi-crystals for that reason. That's good, right? Yeah, and that's how the subject began. That was, and that's kind of the prelude to the story, if you like, which explains why we were, why I was interested in the story of quasi-crystals in the first place, because they represented new forms of matter, which would have new physical properties and there'd be an infinite variety to be discovered a whole new world

and and this field kind of took off from there, but in terms of what I was doing we took a I took a strange turn which was to I was curious if we had made these things in the laboratory Why isn't it we had never seen them in nature? That was my... you've taken a question right off the end of my turn. Good question, okay.

Thank you. So, you know, because we see lots of crystals in nature. There are thousands of different types of crystals in nature. How can we have never once, you know, thousands of years ago or hundreds of years ago or decades ago, seen a quasi-christol before. Is it because it's impossible? Is there something that's forbidding it?

Some people in the field thought so. They said, these things are so complicated, you'd only be able to make them in the laboratory where you can control the conditions just so, put the elements together just so that they'd make this structure. But the way we had come to the idea of quasi-crystals was not just thinking of them as building blocks. So I'll show you a little piece of a three-dimensional tiling here.

It's a three-dimensional tiling, which is a piece of a quasi-crystal. It's kind of a layer of a quasi-crystal. OK. For the other? Yeah, yeah. For the listeners who are just on audio, would you be able to describe to the best

of your ability as well, please? Sure. So this particular structure contains four different types of tiles. They're shown in the image in four different colors. Some are small, some are medium, some are large. And they're fitting together in a pattern which if you looked at the center of it, would have an obvious center of fivefold symmetry. But there's more to this than that. They're held together by Lego-like joinings. But the Lego-like joinings are not all the same,

and they have a special property, which is that if I gave you a room full of these units and asked you to fill the room full of them, the only way you could put them together without leaving spaces would be to make a quasi-christle pattern. You could never put them together to make a pattern which has the symmetry of a crystal. Okay.

So this is forcibly quasi-periodic, not just allowing it, but only allowing it. Yes. Now why is that important? Because it means if you could get atoms to the same thing, they couldn't form the crystal, they could only form the quasi-crystal. And if you could find configurations of atoms that have that, and they happen to exist in nature, well, voila, you could have what you're looking for.

So why not? Why couldn't this happen in nature? Why couldn't there be such a thing? Okay. So, okay. So how do you go about looking for. So why not? Why couldn't this happen in nature? Why couldn't there be such a thing? Okay. So how do you go about looking for this? Well, first thing you might do is go to museums, which is what I did. I went to museums and saw if there was anything in the display case that maybe had not been identified. That's kind of what I did at first. What do you mean? Like, That's kind of what I did at first. What do you mean? Like, sort of, remains and, or are you talking about exotic material?

Well, I didn't know. You know, until I go to the museum, I don't know what to find. So what are the museums were you going to? And what were you actually looking at? What was in the, what was in the cases? Well, so usually when you go to a museum, your eye is taken by the really large examples of crystals that are pretty famous, and those are not going to be misundemified.

But usually in display cases, they're hidden below, drawers, and things like that, and in the back rooms of museums, you'll find lots and lots of materials, which are less familiar, which are less studied. So I was kind of hoping that I'd be lucky. So I went to the American Museum of Natural History. I went to this Smithsonian Institute in Washington, Natural History Museum in Washington, but none of that yielded anything. So that turned out not to work. Not a nice day out, but unproductive, unfortunately.

Yeah, beautiful day out because the specimens are beautiful and fascinating, but no such luck. So it took about 15 years before I began to think of a systematic way of searching for quasi-crystals. And it involved looking for computer databases of electron diffraction patterns. So I could study many at once and use various mathematical tricks to search for ones that might be quasi-christles or nearly quasi-christles.

And then we try to find them, my collaborators and I would try to find them, bring them here to Princeton, slice them and dice them and see if they really were quasi-christles or not. So I spent several years developing with a bright student named Peter Lou. I spent several years developing the mathematics and then actually doing the test. And there were many, many adventures and just collecting the materials, but the end of a few years, no such luck.

All the chance. What years we are now, where are we now? Is there still 80s, 90s? So this was 1998 when we started and by 2001, well Peter had now graduated. He was an undergraduate. He graduated and got on to do something else. Most of the team was disseminated by the end. We wrote the paper and we asked, but we asked if anyone wants to join our little search, write us because we'd be loving, we'd love to have someone join our search. And unfortunately, no one answered that call.

Oh, no. But then six years later, suddenly somebody did, I suddenly got an email from an Italian mineralogist, head of the Museum of Mineralogy and Florence. His name was Luca Bindi, never heard of him before. The University of Florence is not a, you know, it's a nice, but not, you know, a major league Mineralogy Museum, but Luca volunteered to help us with whatever he had in his museum.

And more importantly, he volunteered his incredible enthusiasm and energy. Almost immediately he became as fanatical about this search as I was. And that sounds exactly like a Florence mineralogist, as I imagine one in my mind. I just think that the, like, just full of energy and bouncing around the room. That's just definitely Luca. And actually, his answering, the car was one of the luckiest things that happened in the

entire search because now we're, oh, it's not been going, I guess, this was, let's say, when he answered the call, it was like 2009. We began the search, I guess, 25 years earlier. So this is the biggest joke of luck, both because of his enthusiasm, because of his talent, and then it turned out he had something in his museum that we didn't, couldn't possibly have anticipated, which was, well, I should go back one step and say, so we started the process with him, or I started the process with him, I had a list of possible candidates for him to look at, he obtained them, he sliced them and diced

them and no-lock failure, failure, failure. And then he finally suggested that there was some, he had a collection of interesting minerals in the storage room of his museum. There were a set of drawers. And one of them, to him seemed rather promising because it had a chemistry which is similar to a known quasi-crystal, one that had been found in the laboratory. So we tried that one and he sliced it and diced it and he found there were some tiny little grains in there that looked very promising. He glued those onto the edge of a tiny glass needle, sent those to Princeton, brought to Princeton, and when we looked at it under the electron microscope, amazingly enough, it produced a beautiful quasi-crystal pattern.

A gesta-defraction pattern that one would imagine mathematically, much more perfect than the sample that was found back in 1984, the first example, which was rather sloppy, highly defected one. This was as good as anything man-made that I had ever seen. But it was not made by man, or it didn't seem to be. It was in the middle of this very complicated little rock. It was the rock was tiny. It was only about a few centimeters big.

But it contained lots of minerals, and they're mixed in there, you know, jumbled up with everything else, mixed in with everything else, needed in with everything else with these little grains. And so, okay, we should, that could have been victory. That could have been the end of the story. We could have just said, we found it, you know, Eureka, okay, and ridden a paper. But as throughout the story, every time we think we're done, you know, another question emerges. And the obvious question is, but what would you have asked?

Why is it only in such small amounts? Why is it so rare? Okay, those are good questions. And how is it that nature managed to make the quasi-christol under conditions into which none of us would have ever thought to make it in the laboratory. Because these quasi-christles, in this case, this particular example, contain aluminum, copper, and iron. It's a metal alloy in this case. And those are highly reactive metals, and they love to interact with oxygen, and all the stuff around them is full of oxygen.

So you'd never try to make a quasi-chrystal in an environment, which is anywhere close to oxygen. When we make it in a laboratory, we very carefully isolate the metals and cool them slowly. This rock was cruelly cooled quickly in some places, and there's oxygen all over the place. So question, what is nature figured out that we don't know? And that actually is when the real adventure begins, because to answer that question, took us on sort of international journey

of detective story, intrigue, and mystery that took us, that occupied us for the next few years. That sounds, but it sounds I'm reading the Da Vinci code at the moment in amongst all of the nonfiction that I'm going through and this sounds like the, the, the, the, the, mineralogist's version of the Da Vinci code. It is in the sense. It's, it's, it's, it's definitely the strangest story you'll ever see. It required, it's, it's years of, I'd say extraordinary stubbornness on our part, because there were so many points when it seemed impossible to complete this or even to get started.

And every time it seemed impossible, something would happen that would save the day and get the story started again. So just to start with that, the first thing I did is I tried to find the famous geologist on campus who knew something about how rocks form to ask him, well, okay, here's our sample, tell me. How did nature figure out to do this? His name was Lincoln Hollister, he's very well known, he's one of the first people to study lunar rocks, so he'd seen all kinds of strange rocks and formations. And he studies exactly this question, given a rock, how do you interpret or how do you figure out how it formed?

So I went to Lincoln's office, which is a Princeton and knocked on the store and I told him the store I just told you. And he sat there and he thought for a moment and sort of gave me a strange look. He said, okay, Paul, I hate to tell you this, but what you have there is impossible. I said, oh, no, it's not impossible, Lincoln. We know these quasi-Christols exist. We even know this particular one can be made in the laboratory and what he interrupted me.

He said, no, nothing about the quasi-Christol bothers me. It's this business that you're telling me that this quasi-Christol has metallic aluminum in it. The earth is full of aluminum. It's the third most common element on the earth, but it's all attached to oxygen. Aluminum loves oxygen. It will never find it nature without oxygen present. So I'm sorry, but what you have there is some sort of refuse from laboratory or some industrial byproduct. It's been contaminated somehow. That's what he thinks. Yeah, it's not natural. So we were ready to celebrate, but he was telling us no.

These pude on your parade. Exactly. Exactly. Now, fortunately, because I've had experience with this issue of impossible before, I didn't stop. I asked him next. I said, when you say it's impossible, do you mean like truly impossible? Like, one plus one is three, but I would call the first kind of impossible? Or do you mean just very unlikely or impossible according to common assumptions? But if true might be really interesting. And at that point, Lincoln could easily have thrown me out his window or out of his office, but he didn't. He stopped and he thought for a moment and he said, well, if I were forced to come up with an idea for this, you'd have to, it can't be formed on the surface

of the earth. There would have to be formed deep, deep, deep under the surface of the earth, near the boundary between the metallic core and the mantle. And then you have to figure out a way to get it from there to the surface, but you know, there have been geologists, including my department, who have hypothesized that one time there were plumes, like plumes that would carry material up from the core all the way to the surface of the earth at one time existed. And if so, it could have been carried out very quickly and kept its form. And I thought to myself, oh, it's very unlikely

and bizarre that the story is true, but it's not impossible. And it's true. Second kind of impossible. Second kind of impossible. And if true, really, really interesting, which then suddenly made it much more important to figure out what it was. Well, you've got geological

implications now and... Right. And then I asked him a question which I thought which I'd been thinking about, but which I've been thinking about which is, well, how about maybe it was made in space? Maybe it's part of a meteorite because I said stupidly, there is no oxygen in space, and that would protect it from the oxygen. I didn't know at the time,

but that was a really stupid comment because there's lots of oxygen in space. I just didn't know it. I'm a theoretical physicist who normally works on other subjects, this is all new to me. So, and then Lincoln unfortunately again didn't throw me out of his office. He just said, well, I actually don't know that much about media rights. I'll take, but I know someone who does. He's at the Smithsonian in Washington.

I'll take you down there to meet him next week. And so he did. And when I got to the fellow in Washington, his name was Glenn McPherson. Even before I got into this Smithsonian, he was already waiting at the outside door. He knew we were coming from the train station. He was already waiting at the outside door. And before I could say anything other than hello, he immediately began to tell me how what we had was absolutely impossible. Did you, when you arrived, did you think, I know what this guy's gonna say to me. I've heard this one before.

No, no, I was hoping you would tell me something brilliant that, oh, this is very exciting. You've just discovered a new kind of media, right? For Professor Steinhart, this is what I've been waiting for. Yeah, weren't you here a few years ago and looking at all of the rocks in the back room? Yeah, yeah. So then the next few hours is just giving us reason, reason, reason

after the White House couldn't possibly be a meteorite. And so that's what began, what is the real adventure detective part of the story was, what could we do? We could, number one, try to determine where this rock came from. Was it really not natural? Where, where Lincoln Hollister and Glen McPherson right that it had to be, that was impossible to really make in nature. There had to be some sort of human byproduct, or is it possible that we're missing something?

Yeah. So how improbable, let's say that it was a contaminated sample. How improbable is it that something that was produced by humans and then it contaminated a particular sample would have had this structure that you're talking about? Because it seems like it's even man-made is an incredibly rare structure to have found. That's a great question, Chris. And that were for me was primotivation. Because even though they were telling me what we had wasn't natural, somehow, even through some random industrial process, it had been made in a way that we didn't know.

So I felt I was kind of, some degree in a no-lose situation. Got you. There's either someone in Florence who's got a crazy production technique or there's something bigger and more grand at foot. Right. Right. So, what do you do? Well, we did kind of two things at the same time.

One operation was a detective story trying to actually trace where this little rock came from. And the other was to take the few little grains, microscopic grains and material that were left now, because most have been pulverized in the process of getting up to this point and use those to study in the laboratory. Any sign that would tell us for sure it's some sort of industrial process or sure it's not. And those two, both those two stories, evolves simultaneously over the, or in sync, it's in sync over the next two years. So, almost every day there was something happening in one or the other. Almost every day, Luca, Vindy and I were skyping and there was either some news,

some disaster, occasionally some miracle happening along the way. Okay, so one thing that I wanted to interject with about here was did Luca have like a handling history for the piece of material? Because that would have, I'm gonna guess, it's at least started you off in the right direction Good another great question Chris. You're following you're finding a detective story

Perfectly, well if you ever need if you need an assistant I got British accent in Come from the land of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. So yeah call on me when you need me Well, this is very appropriate because the detective is exactly what was needed. And so that's the first thing we did. We looked in the records of the museum. We found that the records show that this sample along with 3,000 other samples had been sold by a collector who lived in Amsterdam. It told us the name of the collector, the name of the collector, but it did not tell us an address of how to find him. And it had been sold in around 1990.

But with a name, we could now, this is the modern day of the internet, you know, you can go on the internet, and you can literally walk the streets of Amsterdam, talk to people in Dutch, which I don't speak, using Google Translate, and search for it to see if you can find this missing collector. At the end of a number of weeks of trying to do this, no such lock, no finding. Then the next thing we did almost simultaneously was to search collections around the world, because nothing that special about the Florence Museum or this rock so far as we knew, this material. So we started sending alerts to museums. There's various internet sites, which collectors use,

collect minerals. And we got something like five takers, five people who claimed that they had samples of this material, foreign the West, and one was in a museum in Russia. How do you send that sort of a broadcast out? Well, there's actually, for collectors of minerals, there's a website called Mindat.com and collectors use it to exchange information

about minerals and they think they use it to, I think also mineral sellers, you know, people collect minerals, they pay for them. Okay, eBay, eBay for rocks. It's like, it's like an eBay for rocks, yeah. So it's very much so. So it contains, but it's more than the seller, it contains all the scientific information. Okay.

So you can read the properties of your mineral, you can see pictures of it, you can learn something about the history of it. Oh, that's nice. So we look for that. So that's, and then they also, you can put out alerts. So it's a, it's a nice community in this sense. And when we got the four samples from the West and we tested them, we discovered they were all fakes. That's to say,

they were not the mineral that we thought they didn't have aluminum copper and iron them. They were all fake. So this is another side of mineralogy which if you ever collect minerals, one has to be aware of, which is there's a lot of fakery in the minerals game. Counterfeit rocks out there. Counterfeit rocks because, you know, when you buy art, and it's a valuable art, you darn well get it verified by experts, but rocks are not nearly that expensive. So, you know, someone says I have a novel kind of rock that maybe you read about in some Mineral Magazine as being a newly discovered Mineral. Okay, you're going to buy it and you may, you know, you don't have the money or the machinery

to test it. So you're not going to do so, you're just going to put in your collection. And some of these were museum collections, so they had them. But what happened is a collector donated their collection, including the fake, to the museum, and the museum did the same thing. It doesn't have time to check all of it's bulls. So that's how it ends up in museums. And even today, because the story I'm telling you is now become somewhat famous, this mineral can be found at mineral shows. We've bought it from the mineral shows to check if anyone actually had found something legitimate

and we've yet to find something legitimate. So if you find these materials, claims of quasi-chrisals at Mineral Shows, and they're very big ones around the world, like at Munich and in Tucson, Arizona, beware, buyer beware. Oh, ring you, ring you and send you out. Oh, yes, right. But you see, it doesn't work like that, you have to buy first. Take your risk and buy first. You can't take your electro, the microscope over there and just point it at the thing and you won't get your money back.

It's put it that way as far as I know. The show will have, you know, have closed that people have disappeared. No, I don't think it works that way. My mind that needs PayPal's seller protection and buy protection. And they really don't know that would stop all of this in its tracks. It would, but it requires the testing. Now, the advantage was, which worked in our favor was because it's so expensive to test, mineral collectors, and you ask, when you offer to test, will snap up the offer. And that's why they sent us the samples, because you might wonder, why are they sent us

their valuable samples? Well, they want to verify, because if it was correct, they win. And if it's not correct, okay, they understand. There's a certain amount of, that's part of the risk of the business, you know, when you are being in the collection business to accept it. But the one in Russia we knew was real, because when the mineral that is contained inside along with the quasi-crystal, there's a mineral in there,

which is an ordinary crystal mineral, which had been discovered first and published and officially accepted by the International Mineralogical Association. And when you get a new mineral accepted by the International Mineral Association, you're supposed to put one in the museum, a version of it in the museum, which

becomes sort of the standard sample, if case anyone ever wants to prove that that mineral actually exists. It's kept. But by the same token, you're not allowed to fid prove that that mineral actually exists. It's kept. But by the same token, you're not allowed to fiddle with that sample. So we couldn't test it. They wouldn't allow us. The museum director would not let us test it.

So we couldn't do it that way. So what do you do next? Well, you try to find the people who claimed to have discovered that mineral back in the 1980s. So it turns out, well, again, going on the internet, we discovered who person, we discovered who were the authors of the paper that for a submitted it, and then we began to search. It turned out to be a Russian, and we searched throughout Russia for this person.

We discovered that he was once, that he was at the time that he claimed to find this new mineral head of the Institute of Platinum. This is the 1980s, Soviet times, head of the Institute of Platinum. This is the 1980s, Soviet times, head of an institute of platinum. Platinum is a very valuable defense material. This is a guy that you do not want to mess about with. Exactly. He's connected. He's connected. He's a war. Right. And fact, we heard some pretty bad stories about him.

I bet you did. Yeah. What he did with his competitors. Shady Russians. Shady, yeah. So I think that's, I don't want to go too far in that statement. You can say that. I can say that. Yeah.

I'm not, I'm not a professor. So I can call them shady all you want. But, but he was no, he was, he, he had, you know, had various friends of his or his purported, their various competitors of his, I should say, a rest of the K. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to have or removed it from the side at least, so they were no longer competitors of his. We also learned they had emigrated to Israel. So the next thing we did, you know, was try to the same deal in Israel, walking the streets of Israel, and looking through the phone books, I found someone that name, called him up, and he didn't speak English. So I got a, you know, Hebrew speaker to call

him up, and he didn't speak Hebrew. Got a Russian speaker, and of course he does speak Russia. And he verified that he was the guy that was on this paper, that was the first thing. He, when I asked him, we see the person who actually picked that rock out of the ground, he said, yes. And I thought that was great, because now I could find out a lot more about where, whether it was discovered near a factory

or somewhere in the middle of nowhere. And then I asked him about his geological notebook, where is his notebook that describing his discovery. And that's when things got a little strange because he said, I'm not sure. And you have to know that if you're a geologist, you always know day and night, any time of day or night,

throughout your life, exactly where your geological notebook is, it's something you live with and record in, it's like a diary, you know, it's something. Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. So the fact that he hesitated on that was a huge red flag. I'd been mourned by Lincoln Hollister to watch out if he said he didn't know his gillab. Oh, no.

And then I asked him, does he have more samples? He said, well, maybe the geological notebook, and maybe there are more samples back in Moscow. I looked up the price of flying him from Tel Aviv to Moscow, and it wasn't a bad. I said, okay, what if I fly you there, would you be willing to go? We treat it. He said, yes, but. And then it took a while, not just that conversation,

but several conversations to figure out what he really wanted was a rather significant reward for doing that beyond the price of going to and from Moscow. And now it's really worried, because he wasn't able to answer any of my questions about details. And he might well go back, come back with a notebook, but how would I know when it was written?

And he might say he couldn't find any more samples. How could I trust? So yeah, so it's a really tough decision. Should I let this go? Because this is the last thread left in the whole story that connects us to where a sample might have come from. But eventually I gave up on him, I decided not to pursue it.

And so this is kind of one of those moments of impossibility. We had now looked at every, through every museum, every collection that we could get our hands on. And the one person who definitely had a similar material and all those had reached dead ends. And then one of those things happened,

which is one of the miracles that repeated throughout the story that sort of keeps you on the hook. It keeps us kept us on the hook, even when things lived dire, which just began with a simple dinner and Florence, Luca just began with a simple dinner in Florence, Luca having dinner with a sister, and a friend of hers that she had brought to dinner. And the friend is not even a scientist,

but he lives in Amsterdam. And so when Luca tells him the part of the story about there being a collector in Amsterdam, he says, oh, I live in Amsterdam. What's the name of the collector? And he tells him the name of the collector, and he says, ah, I live in Amsterdam. What's the name of the collector? And he tells him the name of the collector and he says, ah, that's too bad. That's a very common last name like Smith or Jones or something like that. And so that's not going to help

you to find this person. But he said, there is an old woman who lives down the street from me. I help her collect groceries. She has that last name. When I get back home tomorrow, I'll just ask her just on the off chance. Okay. So 24 hours later an email comes and he explains, guess what? She's the widow of the collector. No way. Yeah. And some out of nowhere. So as you can imagine, you know, the next day, Lucas, they're an Amsterdam to try. Lucas ran there from Florence to Amsterdam. Absolutely. Which isn't such a log distance, but you know, but he had, you know, wanted to show up.

She won't talk to him directly, because she's a little intimidated, but she will talk to the friend. And the friend asked her, you know, does she know about her husband's collection? No, no, he was the collector. She knows nothing about the collection. He says, well, did he ever talk about his collection? No, no, he never talked about his collection. That was just his business and his business alone.

And this went on for about an hour asking every possible way to, you know, anything whatsoever, anything, any tidbit of information she can offer about the sample. And finally, she says, well, I really know nothing about the sample. And finally she says, well, I really know nothing about the sample. I've been telling you that. But my husband used to keep a secret diary. And while the collection was sold to Florence, I kept the secret diary. The sounds are like the notebook. Exactly, except it was a notebook of a collector rather than a notebook of a geologist. So it's where he purchased.

He was purchasing minerals. Like a ledger. Like a ledger. That's right. And sure enough, she brings forth the notebook. And in the notebook, it shows this sample. It explains that he got that sample. Well, he exchanged things for that sample in Romania, which was...

The story gets more murky here, doesn't it? Yes. And with a fellow by the name of Tim, Tim the Romanian. And of course, it was strictly illegal. I would be considered smuggling to smuggle minerals out during Soviet times. So it was carefully described, you know, in sort of careful terms, how this change was done. And when I heard the news, when we heard the news of this, I thought, wow, this is the, this is, with all the steps and we've had to follow, this will be the easiest step to follow,

finding a Romanian named Tim who's muddled in the woods. Let's take a day, a week, or two weeks, you know, or something like that. But six weeks later, no Kim. And in fact, I can tell you I've never found Tim, the Romanian. So this is again another dead end. And so as a last desperate, desperate attempt, we send Luca back to Amsterdam to see maybe, maybe her husband told him, why why something about a Romanian named Tim. So, again, the conversation goes, this time she's willing to talk to Luca.

And Luca is asking her and her friends asking her again and again, if you've heard of this fellow named Tim, know anything about a Romanian know, anything about this chip to Romania, know, no, no, nothing. I remember nothing at all, nothing to do with me or anything. Then after she reaches a point of exhaustion, she finally confesses that although she really honestly knows nothing, her husband used to also keep a secret, secret diary. For probably the most questionable purchases in his collection.

And she brings that out. And there it explains that on this chapter of Mania, he met this fellow Tim, and that where Tim is getting his samples from, it's from a particular laboratory in St. Petersburg, exactly the laboratory that our fellow in Israel had been using all the time for all his work and mineralogy work. So now we know our sample isn't just similar chemically to the material that this fellow in Israel had. We know it is actually the same stuff. It's a piece of the same stuff. He took some of the minerals and he put one piece in the museum so he could claim a new

mineral, but then the rest of it somehow got out of the country in exchange for something, you know, smuggling operation. And so now we know where we have to look for our sample. We have to look for wherever this guy really got it in the first place. But at this point, we don't trust that he actually is the person that picked him out of the ground. We've heard enough stories and he, but somebody did. Who is it? And I'll save you that part of the ground, we've heard enough stories, and he, but somebody did, and who is it? And I'll save you that part of the story, to say another detective story, eventually let us define the person who actually physically picked it out of the ground back in 1979, and brought it back to this fellow who was in Israel.

He was a student at the time working for him in this remote area far Eastern Russia in the northern half of the Comchacca Peninsula, which is about as far north as far east as you can get in Russia. Oh, that's like barren wasteland stuff, right? Yes, it's across a tundra in a set of mountains called the Coriacs, which, you know, so if you look at the, if you've ever looked at a map of the Comchacca Peninsula, it's right across the Bering Strait from Alaska. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's, and although people usually, when you think of Northern Russia, they think of Siberia. It's actually geologically not part of Siberia. It's the one part of Northern Russia, which is not part of Siberia. It's a part of a tectonic plate which crashed into Siberia at some earlier stage along with the stuff that makes up Alaska and California. And so it's exotic geologically. The seven half you can visit these days, the northern half is still restricted.

Even Russians, average Russians, cannot go there. Why is it restricted? Well, historically for defense purposes, because it's the part of Russia that's closest to the US territory, and partially for mining purposes. It's rich in mining material. So miners can go there. There are American mining companies there, but it's for historical reasons, very historical reasons restricted. And when we found him, he pointed out exactly on the map where this was, which helped us to at least recover some information.

And he offered, if we were ever, I would say, crazy enough to want to go back and look for more material, he'd be happy to help us, which was important if they ever needed to do it. Now, at the time, I didn't think I'd ever think to help us, which was important if they ever needed to do it. Now, at the time, I didn't think I'd ever think about going back, but in the meantime, something else happened in the laboratory that we didn't expect, which is when we were studying these grains that were left from the original Florence sample, we discovered after about two years, we discovered a number of things that told us that it was very likely

natural, but we finally found sort of the killer measurement, which showed us that the material was likely to have come from a meteorite. Exactly the thing that Glen McPherson has said it couldn't have been. And a meteorite that wasn't just an ordinary meteorite, most meteorites form rather recently in the solar system, more recently in the solar system. This one is as old as the solar system, more recently in the solar system. This one is as old as the solar system. In fact, it's formed before the Earth formed, formed before the planets formed. So, we have a meteorite, which has a quasi-crystal in it, which we have possibly a meteorite, which

has a quasi-crystal in it, which may have formed before the planets formed, which means it's also connected to the formation of the planets. It's telling us not only was there an exotic process, the form to quasi-christle, but somehow it's a process which geologists and meteorite experts and physicists didn't know about, still don't completely know about, that nature figured out before there were even planets. Wow. And may have something to do with the core of planets,

the material metals to make up the core of planets. So suddenly this was a much more important story than simply what was already an amazing story, which was finding a quasi-crystal. But we couldn't investigate any further because we were out of sample. All the samples were spent. So the only way they possibly get, and he would be to go back to this remote place across the Tundra to the Koryak Mountains of the northern half of Khmchak. You need to invade Russia. The way to get more of this is to invade Russia. Effectively, which means, you know, if you don't want to, if you actually would like to

get out safely, maybe with your samples, maybe you want to get their permission. But that means you have to get permission from the Russian government. You have to get permission from the FSB. You have to get permission from the Russian military. Then Chicago, this northern half of Comchakia Peninsula itself has its own government, its own restrictions. It's own restrictions. A bureaucratic nightmare.

Beerocratic nightmare, sort of a pile of paperwork, which is hugely, which is huge. You have to pull together a team that's willing to go with you. And that's the hardest thing. That's hard. You're going to have to go to the north of Russia, potentially without any permission. Well, you're going to get the permissions.

You're going to have to get all the permissions in time to be able to go. You're going to have to get money to be able to go. No self-respecting agencies, federal agency, or museums are going to pay you for that. Because any geologist would tell you it's crazy. Some guy found a grain in 1979. You're going to go back and you think there's any chance

that he can find it, or even if he can find the area, that you're going to go back and you think there's any chance that he can find it, or even if you can find the area that you're going to find even a second grain. The chances are, you know, you guess, you know, a hundred percent, a thousandth percent of success. On the other hand, if you don't go, you have no chance of success. So by this point, I've only told you some of these strange things in the story. By this point, you have to imagine we're all in, at least I'm all in and Lucas is all in. You just have to take the story wherever it goes. So even if it's taking us someplace crazy, we go.

We pull together, I pull together a team, I get someone, a private donor to provide money for us. I pull together a combination of Americans and Russians and Luca and Italian to go with us. That includes my son, who was a, where the time was an undergraduate student at Caltech and geophysics and on his way to Harvard. He joins the team, he's my tent mate. Everyone on the team is, I should explain one thing. Everyone on the team is an experienced geologist of some sort, including my son,

is an experienced camper and outdoorsman, except for one person, which is big. Yes. I can't see. So, but never, but, you know, and I actually had hoped to send them without having to go myself, but for various reasons I won't, you know,

you have to read the book to find out well, I got trapped into going as well. So, so won't, you know, you have to read the book to find out why I got trapped and to go in as well. So, so there we were in July 2011, you know, this team going off to literally across the tundra and sort of a roller coaster right across the tundra for four days to get to this obscure stream in the Cori Act, where in 1979, Valeri Kriotsko, this Russian who I had found, had found this earlier mineral. And then the story doesn't end being crazy there because when you get there,

you can't bring your electron microscope there either. So what can you do? You just collect and collect and collect material as much as you can. You pan it like you pan for gold because you know it has to have a little higher density than ordinary minerals. And you just bring back as much as you can, not knowing if you found anything at all. Oh, wow. And then when you get back, you have now have millions of grains collected from up and down

the stream. And all you can do is look at them one by one by one by one. And with realizing that your chances are nil of finding anything. But Luca, who I call the Womow demorocally, which means miracle man, you know, six weeks later, actually I should say in the field he thought he had identified a sample. And six weeks later, when he actually had a chance to study in the laboratory, it's sure enough, proved to have a piece of quasi-crystal in there, exactly the same kind that was in Florence,

attached to a piece that was now unquestionably a piece of a meteorite. So we were pretty confident, we went that it was a sociable meteorite, but now there was no doubt. And in fact, this whole story, which I reconstructed for you, this detective story, there were various points in the story you might wonder, well, have we followed the right trail or not? Maybe we missed a trail,

maybe we were mistaken one place or another. Well, now that we found the material ourselves in the same place, we knew at that moment that that whole crazy story was true. So we had actually solved the mystery. We had been a good Sherlock Holmes detectives and solved the mystery correctly. But more than that, we now knew we had more material to look at, And so far we've found nine different grains, and have been little by little been piecing together the story of when this meteorite came to Earth, some of the story of what happened to it in space,

some of the bizarre things that underwent. We've been able to reproduce some of the conditions in the laboratory. This meteorite underwent very intense high impact collisions in space, and that has something to do with the story, how they formed. So, we've been able to reproduce some of that in space. And we're learning from that new ways to make quasi-christles, that, from nature, that we didn't know where Possible will be for.

And that's where the story is right now. There's still many things we don't understand, and that will be where the story is right now. There's still many things we don't understand. And that will be where the story goes from here. That's an absolutely mind-blowing story. I genuinely think that a novel made from this would be good reading. So the thing that's super cool is your first assumption, or your first kind of hope, I guess, to make it a little bit more exciting and interesting was that this would be something which was created naturally and wasn't something

which had been contaminated. Natural was correct, but terrestrial was incorrect. Correct, that's right. We still don't have an example yet of a terrestrial, probably made, an earthbound quasi-crystal. Doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means we haven't found it yet. We haven't found an example yet. We've been focusing almost all this time on this one, I understand the origin of this one sample because over time it acquitted all this other importance, other importance, like its connection to the early solar system. So we've really been trading, you know, focusing almost all our effort towards that. But we'll swing back towards looking for terrestrial ones Or maybe now that I hope I also hope that we would inspire other people to look and maybe someone will find one before us

For some time, I'm going to go on invade Russia. So as a kind of a concluding thought then if you were to put your academic money where your mouth is with regards to this, what do you think is the reason that these particular structures are formed? Why are they formed in this particular way? And why does it only seem to happen in space? seem to happen in space or why, what's the reason for it occurring? And then what are the implications for us being able to create materials? Does this allow us to make soup anything that's super strong or super useful or super conductive? Well, good questions. So over the years we've collected a number of possible theories of how this may be made

in space, some of which have now been eliminated by experiments we've done since then. But I think that two leading candidates in my mind are number one, which you might call solar lightening. So in the early formation of the solar system, there was all this dust that was surrounding the sun before there were planets, and dust can pick up charge, and as it rubs against each other, banks it to each other.

And some have speculated that this produces lightning, and lightning is one way of detaching aluminum from oxygen, or could it's potentially some way of doing that. And so we've been thinking about that idea and thinking about adapting that in the laboratory, some version, not of lightning, but some version of electrical charges of making quasi-crystals that way. Another idea is that what we see in some meteorites of this early age is that there are pieces of them that actually come from a different solar system.

They existed before the solar system, before the sun ignited. They have what are called pre-solar grains. And some of them have been identified already in meteorites. They're quite different than the quasi crystals. But maybe our quasi crystals are examples of these pre-solar grains that would be formed from nearby astronomical events, like the collision of two stars,

collision of two neutron stars or something like that, producing a metal-witch material without producing much oxygen. That's what you'd have to look for. And we don't have... This is not a very well-developed idea. It's still early stages. But there'd be another kind of idea. So it might actually be a visitor not just from outer space, but from even a different solar system. Either way, it's telling us there are processes that occurred in space, probably not just once, but quite frequently in space, long before most of the minerals that we know on Earth existed. A lot of the minerals there on Earth are formed only

after life formed on Earth. And the atmosphere became filled with oxygen and what was on the Earth reacted with oxygen. If you go back to these early stages of the solar system, there weren't that many different minerals existing. but now we know one of them on the list is a quasi-crystal. In fact, I should say it's not the only one on the list. There are three quasi-crystals, because by the time we got to this stage and the late stages of the investigation, we didn't just find our original quasi-cry crystal, we found two other chemical compositions that made quasi crystals.

This meteorite was full of quasi crystals. What was, what was made up of, or what was the characteristic of the structure of the other two? So one of them was a mixture of aluminum, nickel and nickel and iron. So iron and nickel are very common in meteorites, so the added element was the aluminum as opposed to aluminum copper and iron, which was the first one. And it was interesting, it's especially interesting because whereas the first sample had this symmetry of a soccer ball or a football with lots and lots of fivefold pentagon faces or pentagon symmetries. This new one only had sort of was a stack, a regular stacking of layers, each of which had the symmetry of a decagon, tenfold symmetry.

It was a different kind of quasi-crystal, not just different chemically, but different symmetry, different category. So we found two different categories. And the third guy turns out to have the same chemical composition, and I should say for these first two, there were ones we already knew existed in the laboratory. They'd been discovered a long, decades ago, but now we found them in the meteorite.

The third one is again aluminum copper and iron, but the different composition than the first. And that composition would never been seen in the laboratory before. So that's the first example of a quasi-crystal that nature made and that we discovered in nature before we made it in the laboratory. So we've since made it in the laboratory by using a technique which is not unlike what the way the meteorite created it, which is basically bashing together stuff together at high speed, at supersonic speeds. So we've learned something from nature.

And then you ask, well, why would you care about that besides curiosity? Why do you care? Well, because if you have new classes of materials with new symmetries, new kinds of atomic arrangements, then all their properties, their hardness, their like bendability or hardness, their slipperyness, like tetanol, like slipperyness, all their properties, electronic properties, all those properties are going to be different in some ways. And you're going to what you're going to want to do, which find examples that have the ideal chemistry and the ideal physical properties for whatever application you have in mind. So, already we do use quasi-crystals and applications where we want

materials made of aluminum alloys, but harder than typical aluminum alloys. In fact, it turns out by accident, we've already been using quasi crystals without knowing it. There are certain airplane materials that are used to sheath airplanes that are used for years, but never studied and the electron microscope. By accident, when people studied it, they discovered it contained grains of quasi crystals.

It had been optimized to be a hard aluminum alloy, and they didn't realize that what they were doing by accident was making something that was full of these quasi-crystal grains. By making it hard, there was a byproduct of that creating the quasi-crystals, which was the actual reason for the structural integrity. Exactly. Without knowing that what they were doing, for the structural integrity. Exactly. Without knowing that what they were doing, is that can happen in the materials game. So you discover after the fact,

but of course then you can optimize. Once you know that, you can optimize. And so there are quasi-christals which are used for industrial parts and the like under these kinds of circumstances. But another kind of application, which is to make involves making synthetic quasi-christals, under these kinds of circumstances. But another kind of application, which is to make involves making synthetic quasi-crystals.

By that I mean is I showed you this structure over here in this pattern. Imagine that I take each of these edges and I turn it into a kind of a link, and I make a network of those links rather than a network of solids. And then imagine I shrink that to microscopic scale. It turns out that kind of structure

has a very interesting property when you pass light through it. It treats light much the way a semiconductor like silicon or germanium treats electrons. It's the kind of semiconductor for light. Now, without saying in too much detail what that means, you know that semiconductors play a key role in the electronics industry.

Everything in computers, everything in your cell phone relies on integrated circuits, which are based on the physical properties of semiconductors, which provide, which are materials which enable you to control and manipulate the flow of electrons to transport energy or information. But one of the goals in the future is to convert from electronics to photonics. To instead of electrons being the carrier, let light be the carrier of information and energy. It has lots of advantages. It moves faster and it doesn't dissipate energy as much as electrons do.

Now, you need a wire, but you know, wires already exist. They're called fiber optic cables. Those are essentially wires for light. Now, you need the next important element. You need a semiconductor for light. And it turns out, quasi-crystal patterns seem to be, have certain ideal properties to make them ideal, semi-conductors for light, better than a crystal pattern, a crystal network of the, what we call a photonic crystal. So this is taking advantage of, again, their unusual symmetry properties, the fact that they're much more spherical and much more symmetric than ordinary crystals. So it could be the basis of an entire new arm of the electronics industry. Or photonics, yes.

Photonics industry, yes. Right, so that's a subject which is an idea, which has been around for a few decades, and is just beginning to really take off, we hope, but we'll see. But that's an example. Or taking advantage of this new material as we're doing, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that pull is really, I'm speechless. It's a really fantastic story. I love how many different characters are, genuinely, does sound like a work of fiction that happens to have occurred in the real world. It felt like it, too. Well, I think I'm really excited to see what happens next. I'll be keeping my ear to

the ground to hear what's going to be coming out from the, if there's going to be any more new materials that'll be found. So for the listeners at home, where can they find the book? I'm sure there'll be a lot of people who will want to read more into the story and find out more about the characters and the discoveries that you made along the last few decades of research. So where can they find the book and where can they find yourself online? Okay. Well, the book is available, the book is from Simon Inshooster. It's available on Amazon and maybe in local bookstores. Or you can make the contact and learn a little bit more about the story by going to my website, which is called secondkindofimpossible.org,

secondkindofimpossible without any spaces in it.org. And they can learn a little bit more about what we're doing and also where to get the book and all that. So I think people, I hope people will enjoy reading the story. I've gotten very nice feedback on it so far. And you can also write to me if you have any questions or reactions I'd love to hear what people think of it. Amazing, I'm absolutely certain that people will want to find out more. I will make sure that the link to your website and the book on Amazon will be in the show notes

below. And if I get any questions sent through, I will act as your envoy, your mineralogist envoy and I'll pass the messages to yourself. So to the listeners at home, if you do have any questions, feel free to contact me on my usual socials, Instagram, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera, and I will make sure that Professor Steinhard gets them and I will try and report back

as accurately without bastardizing the content as much as I can. Well, thanks so much, Chris. It's been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you, Chris. It's been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you, Chris. It's been fun.