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The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter Hardcover – January 8, 2019

by Paul Steinhardt (Author)

4.6 265 ratings

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*Shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize*

One of the most fascinating scientific detective stories of the last fifty years, an exciting quest for a new form of matter. “A riveting tale of derring-do” (Nature), this book reads like James Gleick’s Chaos combined with an Indiana Jones adventure.

When leading Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt began working in the 1980s, scientists thought they knew all the conceivable forms of matter. The Second Kind of Impossible is the story of Steinhardt’s thirty-five-year-long quest to challenge conventional wisdom. It begins with a curious geometric pattern that inspires two theoretical physicists to propose a radically new type of matter—one that raises the possibility of new materials with never before seen properties, but that violates laws set in stone for centuries. Steinhardt dubs this new form of matter “quasicrystal.” The rest of the scientific community calls it simply impossible.

The Second Kind of Impossible captures Steinhardt’s scientific odyssey as it unfolds over decades, first to prove viability, and then to pursue his wildest conjecture—that nature made quasicrystals long before humans discovered them. Along the way, his team encounters clandestine collectors, corrupt scientists, secret diaries, international smugglers, and KGB agents. Their quest culminates in a daring expedition to a distant corner of the Earth, in pursuit of tiny fragments of a meteorite forged at the birth of the solar system.

Steinhardt’s discoveries chart a new direction in science. They not only change our ideas about patterns and matter, but also reveal new truths about the processes that shaped our solar system. The underlying science is important, simple, and beautiful—and Steinhardt’s firsthand account is “packed with discovery, disappointment, exhilaration, and persistence...This book is a front-row seat to history as it is made” (Nature).

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“A rare and compulsively readable blend of science and thriller, The Second Kind of Impossible tells of the quest to find a new type of matter that would rewrite the rules of reality. Paul Steinhardt, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, takes readers on a wondrous odyssey across multiple decades and continents as, against all odds, he helps to topple scientific orthodoxy.”
—Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe

“Scientists, smugglers, and spies—this book is an exciting and enlightening scientific detective story. The tale is about far more than a new form of matter; it is also a thrilling and wonderfully written look at how science works.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein

“An epic account of two scientific triumphs: a thirty-year theoretical search for understanding and a real-world expedition into the wilds of Kamchatka. It is as if The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle had been published together in one volume.”
—Freeman Dyson, author of Maker of Patterns

“A truly amazing adventure story, full of twists and turns, right up to the very end. It has my strongest recommendation.”
—Sir Roger Penrose, author of The Emperor’s New Mind

“An intriguing blend of science and international adventure. [Steinhardt] takes readers on a wild ride in search of a new kind of matter…full of intrigue and adventure, culminating with the epic Kamchatka journey....A general audience can and should enjoy this original, suspenseful true-life thriller of science investigation and discovery.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A gripping scientific quest…an admirable popular account of the quasicrystal, an oddball arrangement of atoms that seems to contradict scientific laws.…Steinhardt [is] a pioneer in the field and a fine writer.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"[A] memoir and rollercoaster adventure, packed with discovery, disappointment, exhilaration and persistence...This book is a front-row seat to history as it is made."
—Nature Magazine

"Part physics primer, part fantastic adventure...Steinhardt’s affection and admiration for the journey’s colorful cast of characters infuse every page. Although his excitement is palpable, he is also careful and methodical, often reminding himself that he could be wrong. The Second Kind of Impossible shows the benefit of a slow and steady approach to science, where determination and luck are just as important as insight."
—Science News

"A thrilling mix of scientific memoir and true detective story."
—Physics Today

"A rip-roaring adventure tale...a book that I could not put down because it was fast-paced and had genuine surprises in every chapter. Steinhardt deserves his place on the A-list."
—Physics World

About the Author

Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, where he is on the faculty of both the departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences. He cofounded and directs the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. He has received the Dirac Medal and other prestigious awards for his work on the early universe and novel forms of matter. He is the author of The Second Kind of Impossible, and the coauthor of Endless Universe with Neil Turok, which describes the two competing ideas in cosmology to which he contributed. With his student, Dov Levine, Steinhardt first invented the theoretical concept of quasicrystals before they were synthesized in a laboratory. More than three decades later, with Luca Bindi, he guided the team that led to the discovery of three different natural quasicrystals in the Kamchatka Peninsula. In 2014, the International Mineralogical Association named a new mineral “steinhardtite” in his honor.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Second Kind of Impossible

PREFACE
MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, KAMCHATKA PENINSULA, JULY 22, 2011:

I held my breath as the blue behemoth lurched its way down the steep incline. It was my first day in the mad contraption, a weird-looking vehicle with what looked like a Russian army tank on bottom and a beat-up moving van on top.

To my amazement, our driver, Viktor, managed to make it all the way down the hill without toppling over. He hit the brakes, and our truck shuddered and shook to a halt at the edge of a riverbed. He turned off the ignition, and muttered a few words in Russian.

“Viktor says this is a good place to stop,” our translator announced.

I peered out the front window, but could not for the life of me see what was so good about it.

Climbing out of the cab, I stood atop the enormous tank treads to get a better view. It was a cool summer evening, approaching midnight. But it was still light out, a reminder of how far I was from home. The summer sky never gets very dark so close to the Arctic Circle. The earthy, pungent smell of decaying vegetation filled the air, the unmistakable smell of the Kamchatka tundra.

I jumped off the tank treads into the thick, spongy muck to stretch my legs when, suddenly, I was attacked from all sides. Millions and millions of ravenous mosquitoes were springing up from the muck, drawn to the carbon dioxide I was exhaling. I swiped frantically with my arms and turned this way and that to escape them. Nothing helped. I had been warned about the tundra and its perils. Bears, insect swarms, unpredictable storms, endless miles of muddy swells and ruts. But these weren’t just stories anymore. This had become all too real.

My critics were right, I realized. I had no business leading this expedition. I was neither a geologist nor an outdoorsman. I was a theoretical physicist who belonged back home in Princeton. I should be working on calculations, with notebook in hand, not trying to lead a team of Russian, Italian, and American scientists on what was probably a hopeless quest in search of a rare mineral that had traveled billions of years through space.

How could this have happened? I asked, as I struggled against the ever-growing swarm. Unfortunately, I knew the answer: The crazy expedition had been my idea, the fulfillment of a scientific fantasy that had been occupying my mind for nearly three decades. The seed was planted in the early 1980s when my student and I developed a theory showing how to create novel forms of matter long thought to be “impossible,” atomic formations explicitly forbidden by venerable scientific principles.

I had learned early on to pay close attention whenever an idea is dismissed as “impossible.” Most of the time, scientists are referring to something that is truly out of the question, like violating the conservation of energy or creating a perpetual motion machine. It never makes sense to pursue those kinds of ideas. But sometimes, an idea is judged to be “impossible” based on assumptions that could be violated under certain circumstances that have never been considered before. I call that the second kind of impossible.

If one can expose the underlying assumptions and find a long-overlooked loophole, the second kind of impossible is a potential gold mine that can offer a scientist the rare opportunity, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to make a transformational discovery.

In the early 1980s, my student and I discovered a scientific loophole in one of the most well-established laws of science and, exploiting that, realized it was possible to create new forms of matter. In a remarkable coincidence, just as our theory was being developed, an example of the material was accidentally discovered in a nearby laboratory. And soon, a new field of science was born.

But there was one question that kept bothering me: Why hadn’t this discovery been made long ago? Surely nature had made these forms of matter thousands, or millions, or perhaps even billions of years before we had dreamed them up. I could not stop myself from wondering where the natural versions of our material were being hidden and what secrets they might hold.

I did not realize at the time that this question would lead me down the road to Kamchatka, an almost thirty-year-long detective story with a dizzying array of improbable twists and turns along the way. So many seemingly insurmountable barriers had to be conquered that it sometimes felt like an unseen force was guiding me and my team step by step toward this exotic land. Our entire investigation had been so . . . impossible.

Now we were in the middle of nowhere, with everything we had achieved up to this point at risk. Success would depend on whether we were lucky enough and skillful enough to conquer all of the unexpected obstacles, some of them terrifying, that we were about to confront.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; First Edition (January 8, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1476729921
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1476729923
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,209,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #46 in Crystallography Chemistry (Books)
- #150 in Mineralogy (Books)
- #2,399 in Scientist Biographies

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4.6 265 ratings

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SaguaroGeorge

Interesting application for a Nobel Prize

Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2020

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I agree that Steindardt writes well and introduces many fascinating characters in this book, and that he follows some of the contrivances of the detective story to keep you turning pages. All of that is true, and I did indeed keep turning pages as if I were reading a novel. But this is not a novel. It is a book purporting to be about science and meant to be read and understood by the educated non-scientist reader. That is why there are no equations in this book, though Steindardt refers to mathematical proofs which, in the circumstances, must be taken on faith. So, how much science did I get from this book? What to do I know now that I didn’t know before I read this 368-page book?

At the outset, I learned several new things about molecular structure, in particular the concept of rotational symmetry; fascinating. I learned a bit more along the way, then I got bogged down in an interminable camping trip in eastern Russia – seventy pages of mosquitoes and mud and clay and feasts featuring fresh salmon and caviar and rivers of vodka and panning in a stream for tiny grains of what might, or might not, be remnants of a meteorite crash. I got the point that these scientists did not limit their activities to laboratories, but I got the point long before they finally returned to civilization. I really think this section could have been adequately covered in, say, twenty pages, shortening this book by fifty pages without depriving the reader of any information of interest or importance. I could also have done without the nth repetition of Steindardt’s admiration of this or that colleague, mentor, or student, and yes I already knew that Dick Feynman was a legendary figure in the world of science (and bongo drums, which Steindardt doesn’t mention).

There are some good photos in this book, one section of color plates, the rest black-and-white. Many of the photos of greatly magnified specimens frankly made little sense to me, despite Steindardt’s descriptions. Some, especially the color photos, were beautiful, but also I found it difficult to understand their significance.

So, am I happy I read this book? Sure; I can think of many worse ways of spending yet another day in lockdown. But if it were shorter, and less repetitive, and . . . well, it is what it is, and I do recommend it to anybody with a long span of attention and a willingness to put up with some quirks as the price of admission. And if the significance of the discoveries covered in this book is anything near what Steinhardt claims, then I am happy to support his Nobel application.

3 people found this helpful

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Thad Szabo

Compelling story of intensive research

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2021

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How many theoretical physicists have ever undertaken a dangerous and remote geological field expedition?

The story leading up to the journey into the wilds of Eastern Russia is a tale of the careful consideration and rejection of ideas that are the lifeblood of rigorous science. This account could easily disappear into all of the technical details needed for understanding the importance of quasicrystals, but Steinhardt does a good job of bringing insight into the people who helped with these investigations. He shows the highs and lows of moving emotionally through work that requires above all that you do not fool yourself into believe something simply because you want to. At the same time, he illustrates the camaraderie that can happen over a fiercely debated set of ideas.

Paul Steinhardt was the professor for the first physics classes I took in college. Based on that experience, I expected the clear explanations he gives in this book for both the theoretical and experimental work on quasicrystals. What I did not expect was seeing him in such harsh physical conditions as this wilderness north of the Kamchatka Peninsula. I should not have been surprised by his dedication.

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Edoardo Angeloni

A great adventure of thinking for a new chemstry.

Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2019

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The author is an important researcher of chemistry, which explicates to us the properties of matter. All that introduces new concepts in the old models, producing a revolution in Kuhn sense. So the author has a nice style of describing those differences of paradigma. Therefore we can observe the role of other researchers, whom were in the same group of Steinhardt.

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H. B. P.

A most intriguing whodunit science book!!

Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2023

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This turned out to be one of the most enjoyable science books that I have read recently. The author turned the discovery of a new and unique material into an international project involving scientists from around the world. They finally proved that the material was created 4.5 billion years ago during the formation of our solar system and eventually made it to eastern Russia about 7,000 years ago as a meteor.

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JimmyP

A yarn for serious rockhounds

Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2019

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This book is a real page turner! It also gives he lay reader an insight into how mathematicians (Steinhardt is a theoretical physicist; his interest in crystallography is a sideline) view the world. First, the book gives some background on the symmetries of crystals and especially of Penrose tilings. Starting in the 1970s, he generalized this to 3D structures called quasicrystals, that exhibit "impossible" symmetries, which were initially disbelieved (except by tiling fans),until examples were created in the laboratory! In the next Part, he turns his attention to the question: can these occur as natural minerals? He eventually found samples that suggested some may have been found in remote mountains of Siberia, and describes his trip to the site to collect more. This part is a classic story of exploration, and is beautifully written. My only criticism of this book is that every(!!) electron micrograph should have a scale bar. Through all this, he is concerned with how to be sure what is found is a really a natural mineral and not a result of human activities at the prospecting site. Oddly, he does not consider the possibility that Thermite welding could have yielded spurious samples. I read the Kindle version of this book, and was displeased to find error messages that my "Paperwhite" did not support t his book. I finally downloaded and used the desktop reader, which worked fine, but was not what I wanted.

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LarryD

excellent book

Reviewed in Mexico on July 19, 2020

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A very interesting and educational book. Great reading

Bai

A scientific adventure through theoretical physics and geology

Reviewed in Canada on May 12, 2020

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The author is a theoretical physicist, who hypothesizes the existence of a new type of matter called a quasicrystal. Early in the book, the author comes up with a theoretical model to explain a new material synthesized by Shechetman; there is some debate whether it's really a quasicrystal, but the community eventually accepts it. Now the question is whether quasicrystals exist in nature.

They start with a computer search through mineral databases, and a collaborator finds a promising specimen in a museum in Italy. However, geologists are skeptical that it's natural, due to the presence of metallic aluminum (which oxidizes quickly). It turns out to be very hard to trace where the sample came from, and it's only a small pebble so they quickly run out of material to do tests.

Eventually, they decide to go on an expedition to the place of origin to discover more samples, in the remote Koryak mountains in Chukotka, Russia. After two weeks of digging, they bring home a lot more samples, and confirm that the quasicrystal came from a meteorite and was formed in a high-speed impact in space. Very readable story about the discovery of a new form of matter whose properties are still being investigated.

S

Riveting read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2021

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Wonderful story telling of following leads, theoretical and circumstantial, over multiple strands and many years. While the successes that make the story a happy ending one, possibly unlike most scientific chases, there are plenty of dead ends described to contrast with the heady successes. This gives some flavour of what theoretically grounded stubbornness can lead to. Well worth reading.

Francisco Inacio Bastos

feliz combinação de livro de ciência e de aventuras

Reviewed in Brazil on February 27, 2020

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Trata-se de um livro bastante original, que me agradou bastante, mas não saberia dizer se agradaria a outros leitores, pois é uma combinação, pouco comum, entre um livro de ciência (primeira parte) e de aventuras na Sibéria (na sua segunda parte).

Pode ser que uma ou outra parte não agradem a um eventual leitor que preferiria um livro exclusivamente voltado para a ciência ou, alternativamente, um livro que abordasse exclusivamente o desafiador contexto e fauna da região. Da minha parte, a mistura deu 100% certo: excelente livro!

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NEMO

Story that should be told again and again..... Mesmerizing Journey of a Scientific Curiosity!

Reviewed in India on September 5, 2020

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This book by one of the most influential theoretical physicist would give you a virtual tour of his amazing scientific journey for last 40 years. There's a lot of hidden surprises and unexpected twists and turns that would surely attract one to question everything thing which seems impossible. The take away lesson that I took from his perspective is that we should all seek for a nice closure for our adventures which in his case became infinitely unachievable in the sense that every closure lead him to new questions and setting him into a new journey to seek for the next closure one after another.

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