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A New Kind Of Matter | Professor Paul Steinhardt

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/ - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: modernwisdompodcast@gmail.com

Chris WilliamsonhostProfessor Paul Steinhardtguest
Mar 18, 20191h 9mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:23

    Introduction

    1. CW

      (wind blowing) Professor Steinhardt, how are you today? Welcome to Modern Wisdom.

    2. PS

      Uh, hi, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here.

    3. CW

      Absolutely fantastic to have you on. You're in good company. Some of your colleagues from across the US have been on recently.

    4. PS

      Well, I'm, I'm happy to be part of their crew.

    5. CW

      (laughs) You are indeed.

    6. PS

      (laughs)

    7. CW

      So what are we learning about today?

    8. PS

      Well, um, I thought we might talk about, uh, the discovery of a new form of matter, which I've written about in a recent book that just came out from Simon & Schuster. It's called The Second Kind of Impossible and, uh, it's, uh, in, in one sense it's a science story a- about this new form of matter that people once thought was impossible, they thought for centuries was impossible, uh, 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.

    9. CW

      Wow, so a new kind of matter?

    10. PS

      Yes. So, um, there's always been this question about what ways, uh, exist for atoms and molecules to come together to make a piece of matter.

    11. CW

      Yeah.

    12. PS

      Um, how they arrange themselves is very important to how they behave, how that matter behaves and what it's useful for, and 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 and if you arrange it one way it makes diamond, and if you arrange the atoms another way it makes graphite. Uh, the first of course is transparent and hard, the second is very soft and dark, and it's the same chemistry, the 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, were 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, and then it goes on to talk about, uh, a strange adventure that that led to.

  2. 2:23 – 4:08

    The first kind of impossible

    1. PS

    2. CW

      (laughs)

    3. PS

      Mm-hmm.

    4. CW

      That sounds fa- That sounds absolutely fascinating. So what are the, or what (clears throat) were the established understandings of the, the ways that matter could form?

    5. PS

      Well, um, the ways that atoms can come together, it was thought, are very much like the ways, um, you might, uh, encounter if you were trying to, let's say tile your shower floor, okay?

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. PS

      So let's suppose you were trying to tile your shower floor and I gave you a bunch of squares, uh, I think you're pretty confident you could tile your sh- shower floor with squares with just leaving little space for grout in between, but they would fit together nicely.

    8. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    9. PS

      Um, 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, a f- 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 are the same length and all the angles are the same-

    10. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    11. PS

      ... uh, and, and I asked you to ti- 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.

    12. CW

      Oh, no.

    13. PS

      And that wouldn't be, that wouldn't be very good for your shower.

    14. CW

      No.

    15. PS

      And, and then you might wonder, uh, is that, uh, impossible to do or is it just that you weren't clever enough to figure out how to fit them together? Uh, in this case it's what I would call the first kind of impossible, something that truly is impossible, something no matter which way you put them together you know from rigorous mathematics there's no conceivable way they can make, um, the symmetry, uh, they could make a, they can make a pattern that fills your fl- uh, floor without tiles, your floor without leaving spaces.

    16. CW

      I

  3. 4:08 – 12:15

    The first discovery

    1. CW

      got that. So it, as a beginning, one of the first discoveries that we found is that if someone gets their bathroom refitted and the tiler turns up with pentagon-shaped tiles that they've, they've got a hoaxster on their hands.

    2. PS

      Exactly. Exactly.

    3. CW

      (laughs)

    4. PS

      And the sa- And the same-

    5. CW

      We're learning already.

    6. PS

      That's right, and it's not just true for pentagons. The same would be true if they came with heptagons, seven-fold or nine-fold or 11-fold or 147-fold. So there are really only five des- 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. Um, it turns out there's more ways to put, uh, uh... 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 there's, uh... This relates to the story of matter, because matter forms clusters, arrangements of atoms in three dimensions that fill space just like building blocks, children's building blocks, or just like tiles in two dimensions, and the same restrictions apply. If you ever had a, a, a building block which had the symmetry of a, of a pentagon or pentagons in it, uh, then the rule said you couldn't have matter with that form either, that there were only a restricted set of possibilities.

    7. CW

      Why, why can't you have matter with that form?

    8. PS

      The same issue. When you try to fit them together, they won't fill space, and so atoms hate having empty space. Their forces w- 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, uh, and they won't, uh, ever make a form which has, let's say, five-fold facets, facets of a pentagon. So there, you know, we know there are crystals that have facets which are six-sided and four-sided, uh, 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.

    9. CW

      Got you.

    10. PS

      So, um, but, um, there was... so- so it's... and- 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. Uh, so, um, uh, uh, that was accepted and it seemed to agree w- 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.

    11. CW

      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, uh, academia there pushing you towards one particular conclusion.

    12. PS

      Exactly. In fact, it- it would be on the first page of any book that you've picked up on the theory of solids that said, "Here are symmetries, 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 this... and so, you know, when- when scientists say something is impossible, or at least when I'm listening as a scientist and the scientist says something is impossible, that always sort of brings up the antenna-

    13. CW

      (laughs)

    14. PS

      ... and I begin to wonder, you know, 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, uh, that everyone has been assuming for years, centuries, but, uh, has... is not quite true, and may have a loophole in it? And 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, we did... my student, Dov Levine, 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, uh, slipped in there was I was only going to use one kind of shape. Um, 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 equal spacing between the blocks.

    15. CW

      Okay.

    16. PS

      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 they're disharmonic, or it's like an atonal sound-

    17. CW

      Yeah.

    18. PS

      ... or a disharmony of sound, but this is like a disharmony in space. Then it turns out, what we f- showed is that all the rules about what's allowed and disallowed get broken. You can form shapes with symmetries, uh, tilings now, you can fill your bathroom with those two shapes, the entire floor, uh, with a symmetry which has five-fold symmetry. And in fact, all the, all the patterns that you thought were impossible bef- 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. I- it was theoretically possible, but maybe you can make it in the laboratory. And so, um, uh, 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, uh, there was a- a group led by a fellow by the name of Dan Shechtman at the National Bureau of Standards, uh, um, 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 five-fold symmetry and could, in principle, make shapes with five-pen- five-fold or pentagon shape facets. H- he didn't know what to make of it, he just knew it was somehow wrong-

    19. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    20. PS

      ... 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. Um, but he wrote a... he and his colleagues wrote a- a paper, wha- what we call a pre-print, a sort of pre-publication version of this paper, sent it to a colleague that I had known for many years, who I'd worked with in the past. Uh, the colleague didn't know what I was doing, but he knew I was interested in th- in shapes generally, and he showed up one day in my office and he, um, said, "Oh, I have something to show you." I said, "I have something to show you," 'cause I wanted to show him our new patterns.

    21. CW

      (laughs)

    22. PS

      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, uh, 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, uh, uh, organized.

    23. CW

      Got you.

    24. PS

      Whether they are well-organized or randomly organized. And, um, and also the shape, the shape that they're forming. And, um, it showed a- 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 Dov and I had done of what you'd expect the diffraction to be for a quasicrystal. I just picked it up and put the paper next to the pattern, and, you know, they were, you know, to the, to the level one could tell by eye, the same.

  4. 12:15 – 12:40

    Serendipity

    1. PS

      So-

    2. CW

      Wow. That's so much serendipity as well. And it's hilarious that it was someone who turned up in your office during the process that you guys were going through as well.

    3. PS

      Yes, because we had- we'd 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- and then, uh, by accident, someone did. And that was the-

    4. CW

      Is that,

  5. 12:40 – 14:53

    Asymmetry

    1. CW

      um ... Is- is there an ace- is there an asymmetry there between the theoreticians and- and the experimentalists a little bit? Like, that if you've got something that's tacit and kind of appears in real life that there's m- there's some more weight to it in the scientific community than, I guess, you've got the fear of, uh, presenting a theory and then it being turned out to be complete bollocks (laughs) when it- when it becomes real life?

    2. PS

      Uh, 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- a hypothetical idea, a, uh, imaginative idea.

    3. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    4. PS

      Uh, uh, uh, certainly important for everyone that I presented the idea up to that point.

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    6. PS

      Uh, it was important that, you know, it could actually occur in nature, because at first these patterns look complex until you get used to them. Uh, it's hard to see, in fact, if I show you the pattern, it's a little hard to see what the, uh, what, uh... to recognize what's going on in the pattern. But, um, 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- that you can actually make this in the laboratory.

    7. CW

      Absolutely.

    8. PS

      And, um, so we- so we called this... So just like the ordinary m- ordinary ordered forms of matter where you have regular repeating building blocks, we call those crystals, uh, we call this new form of matter quasi-crystals. Uh, quasi because when you have patterns that are composed of two or more elements that have repeated, uh, disharmonic frequencies, mathematicians call that quasi-periodic, and they call crystals periodic. So we called ours quasi-crystals for that reason.

    9. CW

      It's a good name.

    10. PS

      Yeah. And that's how the subject began. That was... And that's kind of the prelude to the story, if you like, uh, which explains why, um, we were... why I was interested in the story of quasi-crystals in the first place, because, uh, they represented new forms of matter which would have new physical properties, uh, and there'd be an infinite variety to be discovered, a whole new world. Uh, uh, and, um, and- and this field kind of took off from there. But in terms of what I was doing, uh, we took a... I took a strange turn.

    11. CW

      (laughs)

    12. PS

      Whi- which was to, uh, I was curious if we had made these things in the laboratory, why isn't it we had never seen them in nature?

  6. 14:53 – 17:28

    Crystals

    1. PS

    2. CW

      That was my... You've taken the question right off the end of my turn.

    3. PS

      Okay. Good question. Okay.

    4. CW

      Thank you. (laughs)

    5. PS

      So, so how do you... So, you know, because we see lots of crystals in nature. There are thousands of different types of crystals in nature. How come we've never once, you know, thousands of years ago or hundreds of years ago or decades ago seen a quasi-crystal before? Is it because it's impossible? Is there something that's forbidding it? Some- 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-

    6. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    7. PS

      ... put the elements together just so that they'd make this structure." Um, but, um, 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 three-dimensional tiling here. It's a three-dimensional tiling, which is a piece of a quasi-crystal. It's kind of a- a layer of a quasi-crystal. Are you able to see all that?

    8. CW

      Okay. For- for the, um... Yeah, yeah.

    9. PS

      Yeah.

    10. CW

      For the- for the listeners- listeners who are just on audio, would you be able to describe to the best of your ability as well, please?

    11. PS

      Sure. So this particular, um, structure contains four different types of tiles. They're four... They're shown in- in- in the image in four different colors. Some are small, some are medium, some are large. Um, and they're fitting together in a pattern, which if you look at the center of it, would have an obvious center of five-fold symmetry. And, uh, but there's more to this than that. It- 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-crystal pattern. You could never put them together to make a pattern which has the symmetry of a crystal.

    12. CW

      Okay.

    13. PS

      So this is forcibly quasi-periodic, not just, um, allowing it, but only allowing it.

    14. CW

      Yes.

    15. PS

      Now, why- why do... why is that important? Because it means if you can get atoms to do the same thing, they couldn't form the crystal, they could only form the quasi-crystal.

    16. CW

      Ah.

    17. PS

      And if atom... And if you could find configurations of atoms that have that, and they happen to exist in nature, well, voila, you would have what you, what you're looking for. So why not? Why couldn't this happen in nature? Why couldn't there be such a thing?

    18. CW

      Okay.

    19. PS

      Um, so... Okay, so how do you go about looking for this? Well, the first thing you might do is, um, go to, uh, museums, which is what I did. I went to museums and saw if there was anything in a display case that maybe had not been identified. That- that's kind of what I did

  7. 17:28 – 18:18

    Museums

    1. PS

      at first. And that-

    2. CW

      What do you mean? Like, like sort of remains and- and- and... Or are you talking about, uh, exotic material?

    3. PS

      Well, I didn't know, you know. I... Until I go to the museum, I don't know what to find. So-

    4. CW

      So what- what museums were you going to and what were you actually looking at? What was in the... what was in the cases?

    5. PS

      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 gonna be misidentified. 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. And so I was kind of hoping that I'd be lucky. So I went to the mu- American Museum of Natural History. I went to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, Natural History Museum in Washington. Uh, but none of that yielded anything. So that

  8. 18:18 – 19:25

    No Such Luck

    1. PS

      was... that turned out not to work.

    2. CW

      Ni- nice day out, but-... unproductive-

    3. PS

      Yeah.

    4. CW

      ... unfortunately.

    5. PS

      Yeah. Beautiful day out-

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. PS

      ... because the, these, the specimens are beautiful and fascinating, and, you know, but no such luck.

    8. CW

      Yeah.

    9. PS

      So, um, it took, um, oh, about 15 years before I began to think of a systematic way of searching for quasicrystals. Um, and it involved looking for computer data, looking through computer databases of electron diffraction patterns, uh, so that I could study many at once and use various mathematical tricks to search for ones that might be quasicrystals or nearly quasicrystals. And then we'd 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 quasicrystals or not. So, I spent several years developing with a, with a bright student, um, named Peter Lu, um, I, I spent several years developing the mathematics and then actually doing the tests. And there were many, many-

    10. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    11. PS

      ... adventures-

    12. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    13. PS

      ... in just collecting the materials. At the end of a few years, um, no such luck.

  9. 19:25 – 23:17

    Luca Bindi

    1. PS

    2. CW

      Okay.

    3. PS

      All the samples-

    4. CW

      What, uh, what, what years are we-

    5. PS

      All the samples that-

    6. CW

      ... what years are we at now? Where are we now? Is this still '80s, '90s?

    7. PS

      So, this was 1998 when we started, and by 2001, uh, well Peter had now graduated, he was an undergraduate, he had graduated and gone on to do something else. Most 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-

    8. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    9. PS

      ... write us, 'cause we'd be loving, we'd love to have someone, uh, join our search. And, uh, unfortunately no one answered that, (laughs) that call.

    10. CW

      Oh, no.

    11. PS

      Uh, uh, but then six years later suddenly somebody did. I suddenly got an email from an Italian minerologist, uh, head of the Museum of Minera- uh, Mineralogy in Florence. His name was Luca Bindi. Never heard of him before. University of Florence is not a, you know, it's a nice, but not, you know, a major league mineralogy museum. But Luca, um, volunteered to help us with whatever he had in his museum, and more importantly, he volu- volunteered his incredible enthusiasm and energy. He, almost immediately he became as fanatical about this search as, as I was.

    12. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    13. PS

      And, uh, he became-

    14. CW

      That sounds-

    15. PS

      Yeah.

    16. CW

      ... that sounds exactly like a, uh, Florence minerologist as I imagine one in my mind.

    17. PS

      Well, I-

    18. CW

      I just, I just think that they're like just full of energy and bouncing around the room.

    19. PS

      This is definitely Luca. And, uh, and actually his answering the call was one of the luckiest things that happened in the entire search 'cause now we're, oh, it's now been going I guess, uh, um, this was, uh, let's say when he answered the call was like 2009. We began the search I guess 25 years earlier, so this is the biggest stroke of luck, uh, 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, um, well, I should just 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, he obtained them, he sliced them and diced them and no luck, failure, failure, failure. Uh, and then he finally suggested that there was some... He had a collection of interesting minerals in the stor- storage room of his museum, they were in a set of drawers, uh, and one of them to him seemed rather promising because, uh, it had a chemistry which was similar to a known quasicrystal, one that had been found in a laboratory. So, um, so he 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 it to Princeton, and, um, and, uh, when we looked at it under the, uh, electron microscope, amazingly enough it produced a beautiful quasicrystal pattern. Uh, just the diffraction pattern that one would imagine mathematically. Much more perfect than the sample that was found back in 1984, the first example, which was r- rather, uh, sloppy, highly defected one. This was as good as anything manmade 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 a, you know, about few millimeters, few centimeters big.

    20. CW

      Yeah.

    21. PS

      But, um, it contained lots of minerals in there and mixed in there, you know, jumbled up with everything else, mixed in with everything else, kneaded in with everything else, were these little grains. And so okay, we sh- that could've been victory. That could've been the end of the story. We could've just said, "We found it," v- you know, eureka, okay?

    22. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    23. PS

      And written a paper. Um, but as throughout the story, every time you think we're done, you know, another question emerges. And the obvious question is... Well, what would you have asked?

  10. 23:17 – 24:30

    Why is it so rare

    1. PS

      (laughs)

    2. CW

      Um, why is it only in such small par- small amounts? Why is it so rare? Um-

    3. PS

      Okay. Those are good question. And how is it that nature managed to make the quasicrystal under conditions under which none of us would've ever thought to make it in a laboratory? Because, um, these quasicrystals in this case, this particular example, contain aluminum, copper, and iron. It's a meta- 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 quasicrystal in an environment which is anywhere close to oxygen. When we make it in a laboratory, we very carefully isolate the meta- metals and cool them slowly. This rock was clearly cooled quickly in some places, and there's oxygen all over the place. So question, what has nature figured out that we don't know? Uh, and that actually is when the real adventure begins, because, um, to answer that question took us on that sort of international journey of, uh, detective story, intrigue-... and mystery that took us, uh, that occupied us for the next few

  11. 24:30 – 26:31

    What is nature figured out

    1. PS

      years.

    2. CW

      That sounds am- it sounds... I'm reading The Da Vinci Code at the moment in amongst all of the non-fiction that I'm going through, and this sounds like the, uh, the m- the m- the mineralogist's version of The Da Vinci Code. (laughs)

    3. PS

      It is in a sense. It, it is, it's definitely the strangest story you'll ever see. Uh, it required... O- it's, it's years of, uh, I'd say extraordinary stubbornness on our part.

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. PS

      Like ex- because there were so many points when, when it seemed impossible to complete this or even to get started. Uh, and, you know, and every time it seemed impossible, something would happen that would save the day and get the story started again.

    6. CW

      Yeah.

    7. PS

      So just to ge- just to start with that, the first thing I did is I tried to find if there was a famous geologist on campus who knew something about how rocks formed to ask him, "Well, okay, here's our sample. Tell me, what does it take... How did nature figure out to do this?" Uh, his name was Lincoln Hollister. He's, you know, very well known. He's one of the first people to study lunar rocks, so he had 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, um, I went to Lincoln's office, which is at Princeton, and knocked on his door and I told him the story 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."

    8. CW

      (laughs)

    9. PS

      I say, I, I said, "Oh, n- no, it's not impossible, Lincoln. Uh, we know these quasicrystals exist. We even know this particular one can be made in the laboratory and..." But he interrupted me. He said, "No. I'm not... Uh, nothing about the quasicrystal bothers me. It's this business that you're telling me that this quasicrystal has metallic aluminum in it. The Earth is full of aluminum. It's the third most common element in the Earth, but it's all attached to oxygen. Aluminum loves oxygen. It will never... You'll never find it in nature without oxygen present. So, I'm sorry, but what you have there is some sort of, you know, refuse from laboratory or some industrial byproduct."

  12. 26:31 – 28:11

    First kind of impossible

    1. PS

    2. CW

      It's been contaminated somehow, that's what he thinks?

    3. PS

      It's con-... Yeah, "It's not natural." So we were ready to celebrate, but he was telling us no, it's-

    4. CW

      So he's pooed on your parade.

    5. PS

      Exactly.

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. PS

      Exactly. Um, now fortunately, because I've had experience with this issue of impossible before, I didn't stop. I, I asked him next, I said, "When you say it's impossible, do you mean like truly impossible, like one plus one is three, what I would call the first kind of impossible? Or do you mean just very unlikely or impossible according to common assumptions, uh, but if true, might be really interesting?" And, um, at that point, Lincoln could easily have thrown me out his window or out of his (laughs) -

    8. CW

      (laughs)

    9. PS

      ... 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, um, you'd have to... It can't be formed on the surface of the Earth. It would have to be formed deep, deep, deep under the surface of the Earth, near the boundary between the metallic core and the, and the mantle. Um, 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, um, like, um, plumes that would carry material up from the core all the way to the surface of the Earth that at one time existed. And if so, it could've been carried up very quickly and, and kept its form." Um, and I thought to myself, "Oh. It's very unlikely and bizarre that the story is true, but it's not impossible."

    10. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    11. PS

      Uh, and if true, it's really-

    12. CW

      Second kind of impossible.

    13. PS

      Second kind of impossible. And if true, really, really interesting, which then suddenly made it much more important to figure out what

  13. 28:11 – 29:40

    Second kind of impossible

    1. PS

      it was.

    2. CW

      Well, you've got geological implications now and...

    3. PS

      Right. And then I, and then I, and then I asked him a question, which I thought, which I'd been thinking about, but, um, which I'd been thinking about, which is, "Well, how about maybe it was made in space? Maybe it's part of a meteorite."

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. PS

      "Uh, um, because," I said stupidly, "there is no oxygen in space, and that would protect it from the oxygen." Um, now I didn't know at the time, but that was a really stupid comment-

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. PS

      ... because there's lots of oxygen in space (laughs) . I just didn't know it. I'm, I'm a theoretical physicist who normally works on other subjects. This is all new to me.

    8. CW

      Yeah.

    9. PS

      So, um, so, uh... 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 meteorites. I'll take... But I know someone who does. Um, he's at the Smithsonian in Washington. I'll take you down there to meet him next week." And so we did. And when I got to the fellow in Washington, um, whose name was Glen MacPherson, even before I got into the 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-

    10. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    11. PS

      ... he immediately began to tell me how what we had was absolutely impossible.

    12. CW

      (laughs)

    13. PS

      (laughs)

    14. CW

      Did you... When you arrived, did you think, "I know what this guy is gonna say to me. I've heard this one before"?

    15. PS

      No, no. I was hoping he would tell me something brilliant that, "Oh, this is very exciting. You've discovered a new kind

  14. 29:40 – 30:24

    A new kind of meteorite

    1. PS

      of meteorite," or-

    2. CW

      "Professor Steinhardt-"

    3. PS

      Or, you know-

    4. CW

      "... this is what I've been waiting for." Yeah. "Were you, weren't you here a, a few years ago and looking at all of the rocks in the back room?"

    5. PS

      (laughs)

    6. CW

      Yeah, yeah.

    7. PS

      So, um, so then the... And the next few hours he's just giving us reason, reason, reason after that why this couldn't possibly be a meteorite. And so, that's what began what was the real adventure detective part of the story was, well, what could we do? We could, number one, try to determine where this rock came from. Was it really not natural? Were, were, were Lincoln Hollister and Glen MacPherson right, that it had to be... that it was impossible to really make in nature, that it had to be, um, you know, some sort of, uh, human bri- byproduct? Or is it possible, uh, that we're missing something? Um,

  15. 30:24 – 30:58

    How improbable is it

    1. PS

      yeah.

    2. CW

      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 the particular sample would have had this structure that you're talking about? Because it seems like it's... Even manmade, it's an incredibly rare structure to have found.

    3. PS

      That's a great question, Chris. And that was, for me, was prime motivation 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, to some degree, in a no-lose situation. Even if there's-

    4. CW

      Got you.

  16. 30:58 – 32:17

    Prime motivation

    1. CW

      There's either someone in Florence who's got a crazy production technique or there's something bigger and more grand afoot.

    2. PS

      Right. Right. So, so what do you do? Well, uh, we did kind of two things at the same time. Uh, 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, 'cause most had 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 sto- two stories evolves simultaneously over the... or in sync, it's in sync over the next two years, so that almost every day there was something happening in one or the other. Almost every day, Luca Bindi and I were Skyping and there was either some, um, some news, um, some disaster-

    3. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    4. PS

      ... occasionally some miracle happening along the way.

    5. CW

      I got you.

    6. PS

      Um-

    7. CW

      So, um, one thing that I wanted to interject with about here was, did Luca have like a, a handling history for the piece of material? Because that would have, I'm gonna guess, s- at least started you off in the right direction.

    8. PS

      Good. Another great question, Chris. You're following, you're following the detective story perfectly.

  17. 32:17 – 33:47

    The detective

    1. PS

      So of course that's-

    2. CW

      Well, if- if you ever need ... if you need an assistant, I've got British, British accent. I come from the land of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

    3. PS

      Good.

    4. CW

      So, yeah, call on me when you need me.

    5. PS

      Well, this is very appropriate because, uh, the detective is exactly what was needed. And so that's the first thing we did. We looked in the, um, in the records of the museum. We found that the, um, that the records show that th- this sample, along with 3,000 other samples, uh, 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. Uh, 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?

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. PS

      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-

    8. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    9. PS

      ... and search for it to see if you can find this, uh, missing collector. Uh, and at the end of a number of weeks of trying to do this, uh, no such luck. No, no finding.

    10. CW

      Ah.

    11. PS

      Uh, then the next thing we did, so almost simultaneously, was to search collections around the world because, you know, there was nothing that special about the Florence Museum or this rock so far as we knew, um, or this material, so we started sending alerts to museums. There's various internet sites which collectors use who collect minerals, and we got, um, something like five takers, five people who claimed that they had samples of this material. Four in the West and one was in a

  18. 33:47 – 34:53

    Who collect minerals

    1. PS

      museum in Russia.

    2. CW

      How do you... How do you send that sort of a broadcast out?

    3. PS

      Well, there's actually, for collectors of minerals, there's, um, a website called mindat.com, and collectors use it to, uh, exchange information about minerals and they ... I think they use it to, uh ... I, I think also mineral sellers. You know, if people collect minerals, they pay for them. Um-

    4. CW

      It's like e- eBay. eBay for rocks.

    5. PS

      It's like, it's like a eBay for rocks. Yeah.

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. PS

      So it's ... very much so.

    8. CW

      Sounds like it, yes.

    9. PS

      But it also contains ... but it's more than the seller. It contains all the scientific information.

    10. CW

      Okay.

    11. PS

      So you can read the properties of your mineral, you can see pictures of it. You can learn something about the history of it.

    12. CW

      Oh, nice.

    13. PS

      So, so we, so we looked for that, uh, so that ... and, and then they also even put out alerts. So it's a ni- it's a nice community in this sense. Um, and when we got the four samples from the West and we tested them, we discovered they were all fakes.

    14. CW

      Ah.

    15. PS

      That is to say they were not the mi- mineral that we thought. They didn't have aluminum, copper and iron in 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

  19. 34:53 – 36:32

    Mineralogy

    1. PS

      game.

    2. CW

      And counterfeit rocks out there.

    3. PS

      Uh, counterfeit rocks because ... You know when you buy art and it's, uh, valuable art, you, you darn well get it verified-

    4. CW

      Yeah.

    5. PS

      ... by experts. But rocks are not nearly that expensive.

    6. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    7. PS

      So, you know, if someone says, "I have a novel kind of rock," that maybe you read about in some mineral magazine as being a new- newly discovered mineral, okay, you're gonna buy it and you may or ... you know, you, you don't have the money or the machinery to test it.

    8. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    9. PS

      So you're not going to do studies, you're just going to put it in your collection. Um, and some of these were museum collections, so that really were ... they'd had them. Uh, and, 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-

    10. CW

      Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    11. PS

      ... all of its samples. So that's how it ends up in museums. Um, 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.

    12. CW

      Ah.

    13. PS

      So if you find these materials, claims of quaza crystals at mineral shows, and there are very big ones around the world, um, like at Munich and in Tucson, Arizona, um, beware. Buyer beware.

    14. CW

      Or ring you. Ring you ...

    15. PS

      Yes.

    16. CW

      ... and send you out.

    17. PS

      Uh, yes, right, but, you see, i- it doesn't work like that. You have to buy first. (laughs)

    18. CW

      (laughs)

    19. PS

      Take your risk and buy first.

    20. CW

      You can't take your electro, uh, the, uh, microscope over there and just, uh, point it at the thing and ...

    21. PS

      I, I ... You won't get your money back, let's put it that way. (laughs)

    22. CW

      Okay.

    23. PS

      As far as I know. The show will have, you know, uh, ha- have closed, the people will have disappeared and ... No, I don't think it

  20. 36:32 – 38:57

    Testing

    1. PS

      works that way.

    2. CW

      Mi- Mindat needs, uh, PayPal seller protection and buyer protection on there really, don't they? That would, that would stop all of this in its tracks.

    3. PS

      It would but it requires the testing. Now the advantage was, uh, which worked in our favor was because it's so expensive to test, mineral collectors, when you ask ... when you offer to test-... will snap up the offer.

    4. CW

      Uh-huh.

    5. PS

      And that's why they sent us the samples because you might wonder, "Why would they send 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, of the business, you know, when you, or the col- or being in the collection business.

    6. CW

      Got you.

    7. PS

      So people accept it. But the one in Russia we knew was real, uh, because, um, when the, the mineral that is contained inside, along with the quasicrystal, there's a mineral in there which is an ordinary crystal mineral, which had been, um, discovered first and, um, published and officially accepted by the International Mineralogical Association. And when you get a new mineral, um, accepted by the International Mineral Association, you are supposed to put one in a museum, uh, a copy, a, a, a version of it in a museum, which becomes, uh, uh, sort of the standard sample if case anyone ever wants to prove that that mineral actually exists.

    8. CW

      Uh-huh.

    9. PS

      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 on- the museum director would not let us test it. Uh, so we couldn't do it that way, so then what do you do next? Well, you try to find the people who claimed to have discovered that mineral back in the 1980s. Uh, so it turns out, uh, well, again, going on the internet, we discovered the per- we, we discovered who were the authors of the paper that first 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, uh, 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 an institute of platinum. Platinum is a very valuable defense material, so-

    10. CW

      This is a guy that you do not want to mess about with.

    11. PS

      Exactly.

    12. CW

      (laughs)

    13. PS

      He's connected. He's connected and ...

    14. CW

      Wow. (laughs)

    15. PS

      Right. In fact, we, we heard some pretty bad stories about him-

    16. CW

      I bet you did, yeah.

    17. PS

      ... about what he, what he did with his competitors and-

    18. CW

      Shady, shady Russians?

    19. PS

      Shady, yeah, so I think that's ... I don't want to go too far

  21. 38:57 – 40:27

    Shady

    1. PS

      in that statement. You can say that.

    2. CW

      I can say that, yeah. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a professor, so I can call them shady all you want.

    3. PS

      But, but, but he was no ... he was, he, he, he had, you know, had various friends of his, or was purported to have various, uh, competitors of his, I should say-

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. PS

      ... you know, uh, arrested by the K-

    6. CW

      disposed of.

    7. PS

      Yeah, yeah. Disposed of or removed it from site 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 get the same deal in Israel, walking the streets of Israel, fi- and looking through the phone books. I found someone with that name, called him up, and, um, he didn't speak English. So I got a, you know, Hebrew speaker and called him up, and he didn't speak Hebrew. Ca- got a, he- a Russian speaker, and of course, he does speak Russian.

    8. CW

      Yeah.

    9. PS

      Uh, uh, and he verified that he was the guy that was on this paper. That was the first thing. He ... when I asked him was he 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.

    10. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    11. PS

      Um, 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." Uh, 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.

    12. CW

      Okay, got

  22. 40:27 – 41:25

    Lincoln Hollister

    1. CW

      you. Got you.

    2. PS

      So, so the fact that he hesitated on that was a huge red flag. Uh, I'd been warned by Lincoln Hollister to watch out if he said he didn't know where his, uh, geologic ...

    3. CW

      Oh, no.

    4. PS

      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." And I looked up the price of flying him from Tel Aviv to-

    5. CW

      (laughs)

    6. PS

      ... Moscow, and it wasn't that bad. I said, "Okay, what if I fly you there, would you be willing to go retrieve it?" He said, "Yes, but ..." And then r- it took a while, s- 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.

    7. CW

      Okay.

    8. PS

      Uh, and now I was really worried because he wasn't able to answer any of my questions about details, and he, 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 and, you know, how could I tr-

    9. CW

      Crumbled.

  23. 41:25 – 43:00

    The Last Thread

    1. PS

      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, um, that connects us to, um, where the sample, where a sample might have come from. Uh, but eventually, I gave up on him. I decided not to pursue it.

    2. CW

      Hmm.

    3. PS

      Um, and, um, so this was kind of one of those moments of impossibility. Uh, we had now looked at every, through every museum, every collection that we could get our hands on, and the one person who, who definitely had a similar material, and all those, all those had reached dead ends. Uh, and then one of those things happened, which is, uh, one of the miracles that repeated throughout the story that sort of keeps you on the hook-

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. PS

      ... or keeps us, kept us on the hook even when things look dire, uh, which just began with a simple dinner in Florence, uh, Luca having dinner with his sister and a friend of hers that she had brought to dinner. And, uh, uh, the friend is not even a scientist, but he lives in Amsterdam. Uh, 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, that's too bad. That's a very common last name, like Smith or Jones or something like that, and so that- 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, just off- on the off-chance."

    6. CW

      Okay.

    7. PS

      Uh, so 24 hours later, an email comes, and he explains, "Guess what?... she's the widow

  24. 43:00 – 44:04

    The Widow of the Collector

    1. PS

      of the collector.

    2. CW

      No way.

    3. PS

      Yeah, and some- out of nowhere. So, uh, as you can imagine, you know, the next day, Luca's there in Amsterdam-

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. PS

      ... to try (laughs) -

    6. CW

      Luca's run there-

    7. PS

      Yeah.

    8. CW

      ... from Florence to Amsterdam.

    9. PS

      Absolutely, which isn't such a long distance, but you know, but- but he had to, you know, wanted to show up. She won't talk to him directly 'cause 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- he was the collector. She knows nothing about the collection." He- 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, does she know anything whatsoever-

    10. CW

      Yeah.

    11. PS

      ... anything, any tidbit of information she can offer about the sample. Um, and, um, 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- sold to Florence, I kept the secret diary."

  25. 44:04 – 47:40

    The Secret Diary

    1. PS

      And so-

    2. CW

      This sounds a lot like the notebook.

    3. PS

      Exactly, except it was a notebook of a collector rather than a notebook of a geologist.

    4. CW

      Okay.

    5. PS

      So, it's where he purchased, he was purchasing minerals.

    6. CW

      It's like a ledger.

    7. PS

      And he kept... 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, he... Well, he exchanged things for that sample in Romania, which was Eastern-

    8. CW

      Oh, God-

    9. PS

      ... Russia.

    10. CW

      ... the- the story gets more murky here, doesn't it?

    11. PS

      Yes, uh, with a fellow by the name of Tim, Tim the Romanian. Uh, and, um... And of course, it was stick- strictly illegal, that would be considered smuggling to smuggle minerals out in S- during Soviet times.

    12. CW

      Yeah.

    13. PS

      So, uh, he... It was carefully described, you know, in sort of careful terms-

    14. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    15. PS

      ... how this exchange was done. Uh, and when I heard the news... When we heard the news of this, I thought, "Wow, this is the... This is... Of all the steps and we've had to follow, this will be the easiest step to follow, finding a Romanian named Tim who smuggled minerals."

    16. CW

      (laughs)

    17. PS

      Will this take a day, a week, or two weeks, you know, or something like that?

    18. CW

      Yeah.

    19. PS

      But six weeks later, no Tim.

    20. CW

      No Tim. No Tim.

    21. PS

      And, uh, in fact, I can tell you I've never found Tim-

    22. CW

      Oh.

    23. PS

      ... uh, the Romanian. So, this is again, another dead end. And so as a last desperate, desperate attempt, we send, uh, Luca back to Amsterdam to see maybe, maybe her husband told his wife something about a Romanian named Tim. So, um, so, again, the conversation go... This time she's willing to talk to Luca, uh, and Luca's asking her and her friend's asking her again and again, "Have you ever heard of this fellow named Tim?" "No." "Anything about a Romanian?" "No." "Anything about this trip to Romania?" "No." "No, no, no, nothing. I remember nothing at all, nothing to do with me or anything."

    24. CW

      Yeah.

    25. PS

      And 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.

    26. CW

      Oh, my God. (laughs)

    27. PS

      For probably the most questionable purchases in his collection, you know?

    28. CW

      Okay.

    29. PS

      And she brings that out, and there it explains that on this trip to Romania, he met this fellow Tim, uh, and that where Tim is getting his samples from is from a particular laboratory in Saint 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, uh-

    30. CW

      Oh, wow.

  26. 47:40 – 56:34

    Northern Russia

    1. PS

      So-

    2. CW

      Oh, wow. I mean, that's like barren wasteland stuff, right?

    3. PS

      Yes. It's across a tundra in a set of mountains called the Koryaks, which, you know... So- so if you look at the... If you've- if you've ever looked at a map of the Kamchatka Peninsula, it's right across the Bering Strait from Alaska.

    4. CW

      Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    5. PS

      And it's... And although people usually... When you think of Northern Russia, they think of Siberia.

    6. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    7. PS

      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-

    8. CW

      Okay.

    9. PS

      ... at some earlier stage, along with the stuff that makes up Alaska and California. Uh, and so it's exotic geologically. Uh, the southern half you can visit these days. The northern half is still restricted. Even Russians, average Russians, cannot go there. Uh, it's restricted for-

    10. CW

      Why- why is it restricted?

    11. PS

      Well, historically for defense purposes, 'cause it's the part of Russia that's closest to the US-

    12. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    13. PS

      ... territory.

    14. CW

      Yeah.

    15. PS

      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, various historical reasons restricted. Um, and, uh, and when we found him, he, you know, pointed out exactly on the map where- 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, um...... he'd be happy to help us-

    16. CW

      Wow.

    17. PS

      ... which was important if I ever needed to do it. Uh, 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, that were left from the, from the original Florence sample, we discovered after about t- two years, we had 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 ha- was likely to have come from a meteorite, exactly the thing that Glen MacPherson had said it couldn't have been.

    18. CW

      (laughs)

    19. PS

      Um, and a meteorite that wouldn't, wasn't just an ordinary meteorite. Most meteorites form rather recently in the solar system, more recently in the solar system. Um, this one is as old as the solar system. In fact, it f- formed before the Earth formed, formed before the planets formed. So we have a meteorite which has a quasicrystal in it, which, uh, we have possibly a meteorite which has a quasicrystal in it, which may have formed before the planets formed, which means it's also connected to the formation of the planets. It's then telling us, not only was there an exotic process that formed a quasicrystal, 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.

    20. CW

      Wow.

    21. PS

      And may have something to do with the core of planets, the mate- metals that make up the core of planets.

    22. CW

      Oh, okay.

    23. PS

      So suddenly this was a much more important story than, than, um, than simply what was already an amazing story, which was finding a-

    24. CW

      Yeah.

    25. PS

      ... a quasicrystal in it. Uh, but we couldn't investigate any further 'cause we were out of sample. All the samples were spent.

    26. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    27. PS

      So, um, so the only way to possibly get any would be to go back to this remote place across the tundra to the Koryak Mountains of, uh, the northern half of K- J- Kamchatka, but I didn't-

    28. CW

      You need to, you need to invade Russia. The way to get-

    29. PS

      I mean-

    30. CW

      ... more of this is to invade Russia.

  27. 56:34 – 1:09:50

    Conclusions

    1. PS

      from here.

    2. CW

      That's a- a- absolutely mind-blowing story. I, I genuinely think that a novel made from this would be, would be good reading. So the thing that's super cool is your, uh, 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.

    3. PS

      Yes.

    4. CW

      Natural was correct, but terrestrial was incorrect.

    5. PS

      Correct. That's right. We still don't have an example yet of a terrestrially made, uh, Earth-bound quasi crystal. It doesn't mean it's impossible, it just means we haven't found it yet. We haven't found an example yet. Uh, we've been focusing almost all this time on this one, understanding the origin of this one sample because it, uh, over time, it accreted all this other important imp- other importance-

    6. CW

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    7. PS

      ... like its connection to the early solar system. So, uh, we've really been tr- you know, focusing, uh, almost all our effort towards that. But we'll swing back towards looking to, for terrestrial ones or maybe now that... I hope, well, I also hope that we would inspire other people to look and maybe someone will find one before us.

    8. CW

      Before someone asks to go-

    9. PS

      That's fine by me.

    10. CW

      ... go, go and invade Russia. So, um, as a, a kind of a concluding thought then, if you were to put your, um, academic money where your mouth is with regards to this, what, what do you think is the reason that these particular, um, structures are formed? Why are they formed in this particular way and why does it only seem to happen i- 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 sup- anything that's super strong or super useful or super conductive?

    11. PS

      Well, good questions. Um, so, um, over the years, we've collected a number of possible theories of how this might be made in space, some of which have now been eliminated by experiments we've done since then. Um, but I think that two leading candidates are in my, in my mind are number one, uh, what you might call, uh, solar lightning. Uh, so in the early solar formation of the sun, uh, of the solar system, there was all this dust that was surrounding the sun before there were planets. Uh, and dust can pick up charge and... as it rubs against each other or bangs into each other. And some have speculated that this produces lightning, and, uh, lightning is one way of detaching aluminum from ox- uh, 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, um, charges-

    12. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    13. PS

      ... uh, of making quasi crystals that way. Um, another idea is that, um, what we see in some meteorites of this early age is that there are pieces of them that, that actually come from a different solar system. They existed before this solar system, before the sun ignited. Um, they have what are called pre-solar grains, and some of them are... have been identified already in meteorites. They're, 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, uh, nearby astro- astronomical events like the collision of two stars cl- collision of two neutron stars or something like that-

    14. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    15. PS

      ... producing a lo- a metal-rich 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-

    16. CW

      Yeah.

    17. PS

      ... but that would be another kind of idea. So, it might actually be a visitor not just from outer space, but from even a different solar system. Uh, 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 l- a lot, a lot of the minerals that are on Earth are formed only after life formed on Earth and the atmosphere became filled with oxygen and, and, and what was on the Earth reacted with oxygen.

    18. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    19. PS

      If you go back to these early stages of the solar system, there were prob- there were only... 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 in the in- in the, the late stages of the investigation, we didn't just find our original quasi crystal, we found two other chemical compositions that made quasi crystals. This meteorite was full of quasi crystals.

    20. CW

      What were, what were those made up of or what was the, the, um, characteristic of the structure of the other two?

    21. PS

      So one of them was a mixture of, uh, aluminum, uh, nickel, and- nickel and iron. Um, 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.

    22. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    23. PS

      Um, and it was interesting. It's especially interesting because whereas the first sample had the symmetry of a soccer ball or a football, with lots and lots of fivefold, um, pent- pent- pentagon, uh- uh, fa- uh, faces, or pentagon symmetries. Uh, this new one only had sort of ... It was, it was a stack, a, a regular stacking of layers, each of which had the symmetry of a decagon, tenfold symmetry. It was a different kind of quasicrystal, not just different chemically but different symmetry, different, uh, different category. So we found two different categories and, and the third guy turns out to have the same chemical composition. Uh, and I should say for these first two, they were ones we already knew existed in the laboratory.

    24. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    25. PS

      They'd been discovered ago, uh, long ag- uh, decades ago, but now we found them, uh, in the meteorite. The third one is again aluminum, copper, and iron, but a different composition than the first. Uh, and that composition would never been seen in a laboratory before. So that's the first example of a quasicrystal that nature made and that we discovered in nature before we made it in a laboratory.

    26. CW

      Oh, wow.

    27. PS

      So we've s- since made it in the laboratory by using a technique which is un- not unlike what the way the meteorite created it, which is basically bashing together stuff together-

    28. CW

      (laughs) Okay.

    29. PS

      ... at high speed, at supersonic speeds. Uh, so we've learned something from nature and, and then you ask, "Well, why would you care about that besides curiosity?"

    30. CW

      Yeah.

Episode duration: 1:09:50

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