Kamchatka or bust: an unlikely quest
Hamish Johnston reviews The Second Kind of Impossible: the Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter by Paul Steinhardt
A rip-roaring adventure tale, featuring a mild-mannered theoretical physicist, who found himself leading an expedition to the mosquito-and-bear-infested wilderness of eastern Russia in search of tiny grains of rock from outer space. That’s on offer in physicist Paul Steinhardt’s book The Second Kind of Impossible: the Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter.
The tantalizing new form of matter mentioned in the subtitle refers to the quasicrystal – a material in which atoms are arranged in a well-defined structure that does not have translational symmetry. In the opening chapters of his book, Steinhardt explains why the 1982 discovery of the first quasicrystal by materials scientist Dan Shechtman came as a huge surprise, because it violated well-established rules of crystallography.
In other words, quasicrystals had been impossible – but for Steinhardt, it was a “second kind of impossible” that was based on scientific assumptions that were not immutable. Impossible was also the word used by scientific heavyweights including Richard Feynman and Linus Pauling to describe Steinhardt’s quest to develop a scientific theory of quasicrystal formation, and to find naturally occurring examples of the material (Shechtman’s samples had been synthesized in the lab). “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists,” Pauling is reported to have said.
The first part of the book is devoted to the extraordinary effort that Steinhardt and a few of his students put into developing a theoretical framework for how quasicrystals could form in a liquid as it solidifies. In addition to using cardboard and plastic models to show that a 3D quasicrystal arrangement of atoms is possible, his team had to explain why the atoms would create extremely complex quasicrystals, when they could instead form much simpler crystalline structures.
Steinhardt’s early work convinced him that quasicrystals could form in nature, and so he and a few colleagues devised a computer algorithm to search databases of minerals for evidence of quasicrystals. Analysis of the top candidates were disappointing so all he could do was put out a call for mineralogists around the world to be on the lookout for these materials.
That call was made in a paper published in 2001, but Steinhardt had to wait until 2007 for the next big breakthrough. It came in an e-mail from Luca Bindi, a mineralogist at the University of Florence who had also developed an obsession with quasicrystals, one that matched Steinhardt’s. Having read Steinhardt’s paper, Bindi had found a candidate. Incredibly, a year later in 2008, a quasicrystal was confirmed among samples held in a Florence museum’s collection of minerals.
That mineral was labelled khatyrkite and was believed to have been gathered on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east of Russia. But there was a problem – two of the US’s leading geoscientists said in no uncertain terms that they believed the sample was not natural, and was very likely to be a bit of slag from an industrial metallurgical process.
After some international sleuthing that reads much like a detective thriller, Steinhardt and Bindi were crestfallen to discover that it was going to be very difficult to prove that the mineral actually came from Kamchatka. The sample was apparently gathered by a shady scientist and former Soviet apparatchik, who asked Steinhardt for an exorbitant amount of money to establish provenance. And when he refused, the former apparatchik threatened other Russians not to help with the search.
Other characters Steinhardt encountered included a recalcitrant widow in Amsterdam whose late husband sold the sample to the museum, and the mysterious “Tim the Romanian” who apparently acted as go-between the Dutch dealer and the Russians. The bizarre and highly unreliable provenance of the sample caused a serious rift between Steinhardt and his geoscientist colleagues – who remained concerned that the quasicrystal might be artificial and temporarily quit Steinhardt’s team.
Despite these doubts, in 2009 Steinhardt and colleagues published a paper in Science (10.1126/science.1170827) announcing the discovery of the first ever naturally occurring quasicrystal. With that mission accomplished, many scientists would have left it there. However, an oxygen-isotope study of the sample then revealed what Steinhardt and others had suspected for some time – that the quasicrystal came from space, as a meteorite. What is more, the team had located the Russian scientist Valery Kryachko (a former underling of the apparatchik) who had found the sample in Kamchatka.
Despite being a theoretical physicist who had never spent a night in a tent, he found himself leading an expedition to a remote part of Russia in search of the remains of a meteorite
So as far as Steinhardt was concerned, there was only one thing he could do. Despite being a theoretical physicist who had never spent a night in a tent, he found himself leading an expedition to a remote part of Russia in search of the remains of a meteorite. Incredibly, the team was able to dig enough tiny grains out of the chilly Kamchatka mud to begin to answer important questions about where and when the quasicrystals came from.
Throughout the book, Steinhardt is effusive with praise and respect for his colleagues, but his characterizations do verge on the mawkish. After a few hundred pages, it becomes clear that every new collaborator mentioned in the book would have a brilliant scientific mind, be highly critical and be a hard worker. Despite his praise and respect for his team – many of whom were not physicists – there is also a whiff of “theoretical physicist knows best”, and it feels as though Steinhardt sees his discovery as an example of how the pure and disciplined thought processes of a theoretical physicist can cut through the noise and confusion of other disciplines.
The Second Kind of Impossible is a book that I could not put down because it was fast-paced and had genuine surprises in every chapter. It also provides an insight into the professional life of an “A-list” physicist at an Ivy League university. Steinhardt seems to have little trouble gaining access to the best materials characterization facilities in the US. He manages to gain funding from an unnamed private benefactor for an expedition that some experts had described as “hopeless”. Moreover, a study that Steinhardt describes as only producing “dud” results is written up in a paper published in Physical Review Letters. Many jobbing physicists would be thrilled to publish their best ever results in this high-status journal. Ultimately, Steinhardt deserves his place on the A-list because he was right about naturally occurring quasicrystals and science is the better for it.