A New Kind Of Matter | Professor Paul Steinhardt
Chris Williamson (host), Professor Paul Steinhardt (guest), Narrator
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Chris Williamson and Professor Paul Steinhardt, A New Kind Of Matter | Professor Paul Steinhardt explores cosmic Quasicrystals: The Meteorite Mystery That Rewrote Solid Matter Professor Paul Steinhardt explains the discovery of quasicrystals, a fundamentally new form of ordered matter once thought mathematically impossible under the classical rules of crystallography. By allowing multiple building blocks arranged in a non-repeating (quasi-periodic) way, he and his student showed that forbidden symmetries, like fivefold patterns, can in fact exist—and were soon matched by an accidental laboratory discovery.
Cosmic Quasicrystals: The Meteorite Mystery That Rewrote Solid Matter
Professor Paul Steinhardt explains the discovery of quasicrystals, a fundamentally new form of ordered matter once thought mathematically impossible under the classical rules of crystallography. By allowing multiple building blocks arranged in a non-repeating (quasi-periodic) way, he and his student showed that forbidden symmetries, like fivefold patterns, can in fact exist—and were soon matched by an accidental laboratory discovery.
The conversation then pivots into a decades-long detective story tracking a tiny quasicrystal grain from an Italian museum collection back through collectors, smugglers, Soviet-era institutes, and mineral ledgers to a remote river in far eastern Russia. There, Steinhardt’s team confirmed that the material originated in a meteorite that formed before the Earth itself.
This finding implies that quasicrystals can be produced by exotic high-energy processes in space, possibly even in other solar systems, revealing unknown pathways in early planetary formation. Beyond the story, Steinhardt outlines how quasicrystals already influence industrial alloys and may enable future photonic technologies that manipulate light like semiconductors handle electrons.
Key Takeaways
‘Impossible’ scientific claims often hide assumptions rather than true impossibilities.
Steinhardt distinguishes between the “first kind” of impossible (rigorously ruled out, like tiling a floor with perfect pentagons using a single tile) and the “second kind,” where a hidden assumption can be relaxed—here, allowing multiple tile types and quasi-periodicity unlocked entirely new atomic arrangements.
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Quasicrystals are a fundamentally new ordered state of matter with forbidden symmetries.
Unlike conventional crystals that repeat a single building block periodically, quasicrystals use two or more building blocks arranged in a non-repeating but ordered pattern, enabling symmetries (like fivefold and tenfold) long thought impossible for matter.
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Theory and experiment advanced independently, then converged in a powerful confirmation.
While Steinhardt’s group developed the mathematical theory of quasicrystals, Dan Shechtman experimentally observed a diffraction pattern breaking crystallographic rules; only when Steinhardt compared the precomputed theoretical pattern to Shechtman’s data did the match reveal they were seeing the same new kind of matter.
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Meticulous detective work can solve deep scientific mysteries that span decades and borders.
Tracing a grain from a museum drawer back to its origin required mining old catalog records, contacting widows of collectors, deciphering ‘secret’ and ‘secret-secret’ diaries, navigating fakes in mineral markets, and ultimately identifying the original field geologist in remote Russia.
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Natural quasicrystals have extraterrestrial origins and predate Earth itself.
Laboratory analyses showed the Florence sample came from an ancient meteorite, likely formed in violent high-pressure space collisions or other exotic processes before planets existed, implying that quasicrystals belong on the list of earliest known minerals in the solar system.
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Extreme space conditions suggest new ways to synthesize advanced materials on Earth.
Reproducing meteorite-like high-impact conditions in the lab has already yielded a new quasicrystal composition first found in nature, revealing that high-speed impacts and unusual oxidation conditions can be harnessed as novel synthesis routes.
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Quasicrystals have practical uses today and promise more in future photonic technologies.
They already strengthen certain aluminum alloys used in aircraft without designers realizing quasicrystals were involved; their unique symmetries also make them strong candidates for ‘photonic semiconductors’ that could underpin future light-based (rather than electron-based) information technologies.
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Notable Quotes
“When scientists say something is impossible, I always ask: which kind of impossible is it?”
— Paul Steinhardt
“We thought anything with the symmetry of a pentagon was forbidden in matter—but we were wrong.”
— Paul Steinhardt
“This little grain violated centuries‑old laws of crystallography and might have formed before the Earth existed.”
— Paul Steinhardt
“By the time we got back from Russia and found the same quasicrystal in the same place, we knew the whole crazy detective story was true.”
— Paul Steinhardt
“Quasicrystals may become to light what semiconductors are to electrons.”
— Paul Steinhardt
Questions Answered in This Episode
What other long‑held ‘impossibilities’ in physics or materials science might actually be second‑kind impossibilities awaiting a similar loophole?
Professor Paul Steinhardt explains the discovery of quasicrystals, a fundamentally new form of ordered matter once thought mathematically impossible under the classical rules of crystallography. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How could future space missions be designed to deliberately search for more quasicrystal-bearing meteorites or pre-solar grains?
The conversation then pivots into a decades-long detective story tracking a tiny quasicrystal grain from an Italian museum collection back through collectors, smugglers, Soviet-era institutes, and mineral ledgers to a remote river in far eastern Russia. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What are the biggest technical challenges in engineering quasicrystal-based photonic devices that outperform today’s semiconductor electronics?
This finding implies that quasicrystals can be produced by exotic high-energy processes in space, possibly even in other solar systems, revealing unknown pathways in early planetary formation. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Could the processes that create quasicrystals in space also influence how planetary cores and crusts differentiate and evolve?
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How should scientific communities balance skepticism with openness when confronted with data that appears to violate established ‘laws,’ as in Shechtman’s original quasicrystal discovery?
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Transcript Preview
(wind blowing) Professor Steinhardt, how are you today? Welcome to Modern Wisdom.
Uh, 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 on recently.
Well, I'm, I'm happy to be part of their crew.
(laughs) You are indeed.
(laughs)
So what are we learning about today?
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.
Wow, so a new kind of matter?
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.
Yeah.
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.
(laughs)
Mm-hmm.
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?
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?
(laughs)
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.
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