Physicists Say They’ve Created an ‘Impossible’ New Form of Matter: Supersolids

Our world just got a little stranger, with physicists claiming they’ve successfully created a brand new ‘impossible’ form of matter in the lab – supersolids, which have properties of both liquids and solids at the same time.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

Physicists Say They’ve Created an ‘Impossible’ New Form of Matter: Supersolids

Our world just got a little stranger, with physicists claiming they’ve successfully created a brand new ‘impossible’ form of matter in the lab – supersolids, which have properties of both liquids and solids at the same time.

More…

I wonder if the scientists really said that.

Why would they call it “impossible” if there was established physics that said it might be “possible”?

There are already states of matter that combine the properties of solids and liquids, including viscoelastic materials and glasses for starters. let’s look at what a supersolid is:

“a ‘supersolid’ is a strange sate of matter that has the crystalline structure of a solid, while flowing like a liquid”.

A quasicrystal could do that. And it’s well known that crystals can flow by the migration of discontinuities through them. Crystal flow works better in thin films than in 3-D masses because the discontinuities tend to get tangled up with each other in 3-D, until they sort themselves out into shear bands.

Let’s look further:

“it can also flow without viscosity” etc.

I think I understood this better in 2004.