The Second Kind of Impossible
The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter
Ranked #10 in Electromagnetism
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... more
Reviews and Recommendations
We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The Second Kind of Impossible from the world's leading experts.
Barbara Kiser It’s a window on the process of discovery, a blow-by-blow account of a long wrangle with theory and evidence. Paul Steinhardt — a cosmologist fascinated by novel forms of matter — relates his indefatigable decades-long quest for an ‘impossible’ material, the quasicrystal, with Holmesian intensity…This is a book offering a real sense of the collaborative, generous-minded aspect of doing science. (Source)
Nigel Shadbolt Paul Steinhardt, a world-renowned physicist, takes us on a journey through the history of our understanding of crystals. He explains how scientific orthodoxy came to a firm view as to the sorts of structures nature would generate. (Source)
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