One of the most fascinating and surprising scientific detective stories of the last fifty years, an exciting quest for a new form of matter, told firsthand. The Second Kind of Impossible 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 the laws of crystallography which have been 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 sci
