The Second Kind of Impossible by Paul J. Steinhardt

What if I told you that this is a book about quasicrystals that reads like a thriller? You’d think I was nuts. Well, this is a book about the search for a quasicrystal, something thought to be impossible, that reads like a thriller.

The subtitle of The Second Kind of Impossible is The Extraordinary Quest for a New Kind of Matter. Now, we’re getting to it. Matter is matter, isn’t it? New sorts of matter might be the subject of science fiction but not of real science.

Except real science is doing all sorts of things those of us with no more than a high school education in it might think impossible. Forget common sense when you approach modern science. It isn’t going to help you.

What will help you is masterful storytelling and that is what you have with The Second Kind of Impossible. The book veers around a bit at the beginning, swerving from a preface that flashes forward to the end of the story, to a lecture the author gave to an audience that included the celebrated, and somewhat fearsome, Richard Feynman, to 1781 and a French scientist’s work on crystals. It is during this dive into the history of science that the narration settles down and the reader gets a thorough explanation, with pictures, of what exactly crystals are and why the mathematical concept of symmetry matters. Don’t be daunted. It’s not hard. It’s full of familiar things like cubes and tetrahedrons. Admittedly the next chapter gets harder, because it goes into three dimensional regular bodies that are impossible in crystals, like icosahedrons. But here again, it’s all explained. You can’t tile a floor in regular pentagons. Just try it if you don’t believe me. Equally you can’t build matter out of icosahedrons.

“Yet somehow, icosahedral symmetry had received the highest score for alignment of atomic bonds in our computer experiment.”

Of course, the story is far more complicated than that. This is only page 34 of the book.  So far Steinhardt is dealing with a mathematical simulation. The man is a theoretical physicist, after all. But, over the course of many years, he and his colleagues move from mathematics, to investigating artificially generated crystals to finding natural crystals on the surface of the earth: weird, impossible matter.

The material Steinhardt is working with is unimaginably small.

 “Princeton, November 21, 2008: I kept a firm grip on the small box as I trudged up the hill from my office to the Princeton Imaging Center. Inside were the two brass cylinders I had received from Luca (through the mail from Italy). Each cylinder held a thin glass fiber about an inch long with a precious speck of material glued onto the end… Removing the specks from the glass fibers would be a risky endeavor…Preparing our sample for a test…required removing a speck from the glass fiber, separating it into its many microscopic individual grains, and then sorting among all of those grains to find one that would be thin enough for the electron beam to pass through.”

Suppose they dropped the ‘speck’? Suppose they breathed too hard and it blew away? What really happened was just as tense as you can imagine. It’s on page 139.

Apart from the thrill of the chase and the unravelling of a mystery, The Second Kind of Impossible is a window into the workings of science as it really happens.

The crystal structure Steinhardt was investigating was physically impossible. You can only tile a floor with a limited and known set of regular shapes, right? Well, not quite. In the 1970s Roger Penrose solved a famous mathematical puzzle concerning tiles: can you find a set of tiles of a shape that can cover a floor without leaving gaps and do so only non-periodically? Which means they don’t repeat in a regular mathematically symmetric pattern (which is why you had to know about symmetry back in chapter 1). Penrose found some, which he called kites and darts. Not only can you cover a floor with them, there is no regular pattern option for these shapes. (I’m familiar with these non-periodic tilings of the plane because my husband is fascinated with them and has made tops for tables and jewellery boxes using patterns that are non-periodic.)

Penrose’s work demonstrated a symmetry that was “strictly forbidden according to the mathematics of tilings and the established laws of crystallography.”

New and outrageous ideas in science arouse passionate feelings and opposition and not just from the scientifically illiterate but from the scientific community itself. And this is not a bad thing. It is a fundamental part of the way science works.

“The first and most vociferous critic was Linus Pauling. ‘There is no such thing as quasicrystals,’ Pauling liked to joke, ‘Only quasi scientists’….during the course of his scientific career, Pauling had consistently challenged and prevailed over conventional wisdom. He was not someone you wanted as an intellectual opponent.”

Undaunted, encouraged in fact, Steinhardt sets up a B team of renowned sceptical scientists, not including Pauling, to read, review and comment on his team’s work. It is part of the process of good science. The whole quasicrystal hunting endeavour is a master class in international, interdisciplinary co-operation and creative opposition.

The icing on the cake for this voyage of discovery is an actual voyage of discovery to one of the most remote and inaccessible parts on the world: the Kamchatka peninsular. The story of how Steinhardt, no longer a young man, and team of geologists eventually find the elusive ‘naturally’ occurring quasi crystal is a whole new eyeopener into the world of science.

“Middle of Nowhere, Kamchatka Peninsula, July 22, 2011: Somehow the unimaginable had happened. No one was less suited to take part in, much less lead, an expedition to the remote regions of Far Eastern Russia. Yet here I was.”

Kamchatka is the most easterly part of Russia, just over the Bearing Straits from Alaska. It’s a restricted area requiring layers of permissions to visit. It has a very short season it calls summer, which rejoices in wildflowers and mosquitoes. It is home to a large population of very large Kamchatka Brown Bears. And there aren’t any roads outside the few settlements and certainly not where this expedition intends going: the landing site of meteor they believed was where a Russian geologist had found quasicrystals on a surveying trip decades earlier. Fortunately that geologist is still alive and eager to join the expedition. And how Steinhardt makes contact with that geologist is another whole story in this book packed with fascinating stories, one which tells a tale of black market deals and the unexpectedly criminal world of amateur geology.

Do you like yarns almost impossible to believe? You should try The Second Kind of Impossible. This story is both true and great science.