Inside The 30-Year Quest To Find A New State Of Matter
Steinhardt’s new book, The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter (Simon Schuster) chronicles his 30-year obsession with a structure called the quasi-crystal, from proving that it could theoretically exist to traveling to remote parts of Russia to discover whether it might be found in nature. Those are quasi-crystals, and their existence means there’s a whole new world of forms of matter. In 1998, I started working with a geologist at Princeton to find quasi-crystals in some obscure places using crystal databases.
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