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

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. My guest this week is Professor Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University. And despite being a physicist, the roller coaster that we're taking on today reads and hears 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, but suffice it to say that he's found a new type of matter, 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 sound 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 mindblower. Professor Steinhardt, how are you today? Welcome to Modern Wisdom.

**Paul Steinhardt** (1:24)
Hi, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:27)
Absolutely fantastic to have you on. You're in good company. Some of your colleagues from across the US have been on recently.

**Paul Steinhardt** (1:34)
Well, I'm happy to be part of the crew.

**Chris Williamson** (1:37)
You are indeed. So what are we learning about today?

**Paul Steinhardt** (1:41)
Well, I thought we might talk about the discovery of a new form of matter, which I've written about in a recent book that 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 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.

**Chris Williamson** (2:14)
Wow. So a new kind of matter.

**Paul Steinhardt** (2:20)
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 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, 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.

**Chris Williamson** (3:38)
That sounds absolutely fascinating. So what are the or what were the established understandings of the the ways that matter could form?

**Paul Steinhardt** (3:48)
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, let's say, tile your shower floor. OK, 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 tile your shower floor with squares, with just leaving a little space for grout 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, 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. And I asked you to tile, 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.
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 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 the symmetry, they can make a pattern that fills your floor without, tiles your floor without leaving spaces.