The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter

In this audiobook, from a first-person perspective, there is an exciting and accessible account of a remarkable scientific discovery. Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist and professor at Princeton University, author of important cosmological theories about the early Universe, whose name in 2014 inspired the International Mineralogical Association to name a new mineral “steinhardtite,” describes how a new form of matter—quasicrystals—was found, with an atomic configuration that is forbidden by the laws of classical crystallography. It is a gripping story about the birth of a new scientific field, about a “impossibility” that turned out to be possible, and about genuine passion and desperate courage in science.