For me this was a great break from the fiction I often read. One unexpected pleasure was the discussion of Penrose tiles, something I’d read about many years ago in Scientific American.
The story odd humanized in many ways. It is a very well told tale. ( )

In a clear, accessible style, Paul Steinhardt chronicles the fascinating tale of the discovery of quasicrystals, once thought impossible, and the even more impossible quest for one existing on our planet. It's a story of dogged research, brilliant minds, clashing opinions, years-long persistence, amazing luck, U.S.-Russian cooperation, and an extraordinary journey to the desolate, outer reaches of the Kamchatka tundra---all of it unfolding, with twists and turns, like one of Michael Chrichton's novels. Highly recommended. ( )

Not sure that I have a great deal to add to the previous reviews of this memoir of a career in science, though while I found it interesting I do suggest that the "extraordinary" of the subtitle is a bit of an overstretch. Call Steinhardt's hunt for anomalous forms of matter a monument to the value of asking awkward questions, as it took a lot of nerve to simply call the basic principles of material science if not wrong, than at least inadequate. ( )

A compelling science story. Steinhardt does a great job explaining both the mathematics he worked on, generalizing Penrose tiles to three dimensions, and the experimental and field mineralogy that that led to, a search to find and understand natural quasicrystals. For me the mineralogy was the most interesting. They first process one meteorite sample, then amazingly they manage to find its source site (it had been sold to a museum from a collector who bought it from a smuggler who took it from a Russian lab), go there, and find more samples! The details of how they process these samples are especially cool; I had no idea what mineralogists actually do, and the amount of time they spent processing these tiny grains was impressive. It is quite difficult, and it seems that they still don't entirely understand the atomic structures. For a science story, there is a fair amount of drama and conflict, from some of his collaborators disagreeing on whether a paper should be published to lost mail.

I only wish Steinhardt gave more about the connection between the mathematics and the physical quasicrystals. How do the mathematical tiling models they develop connect to these different atomic arrangements, or do they? Also, I'd like to know more about applications of quasicrystals, and about their artificial synthesis, either by annealing or by shocks. What are the main open problems? Despite these gaps, I think that the parts he does explain are explained well.

> "Impossible!" Feynman finally said. I nodded in agreement and smiled, because I knew that to be one of his greatest compliments. He looked back up at the wall, shaking his head. "Absolutely impossible! That is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen."

> I developed the first computer-generated continuous random network (CRN) model of glass and amorphous silicon in 1973, the summer before my senior year at Caltech. The model was widely used to predict structural and electronic properties of these materials. In later years, while working with Ronchetti, I developed more sophisticated programs to simulate the rapid cooling and solidification process.

> The first and most vociferous critic was two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. Pauling was a towering figure in the scientific community. As one of the founders of quantum chemistry and molecular biology, he was widely regarded as one of the most important chemists of the twentieth century. "There is no such thing as quasicrystals," Pauling liked to joke derisively. "Only quasi-scientists." Pauling proposed that all the peculiar alloys that had been discovered were complex examples of multiple-twinned crystals,

> The theoretical breakthrough came with the discovery of an alternative to Penrose’s interlocking rules, which we called "growth rules." They made it possible to add tiles one by one to a pattern without making any mistakes or creating any defects.

> In their view, the paper should not be published unless and until we could definitively rule out the possibility that the metallic aluminum alloys were man-made. … I believe that the sample you have been working with is not natural. I feel I am up against a wall of diminishing returns to determine its origin. Lincoln explained that he did not want to continue working with us unless we could somehow find a completely fresh sample from some other source. Glenn's withdrawal from the project was implicit.

> The invaluable sample of khatyrkite Luca found tucked away in his museum’s storage room, the unexpected discovery of a natural quasicrystal in the Princeton lab with Nan Yao, the embarrassingly fake samples we discovered in private collections, the untouchable holotype locked away in a St. Petersburg museum, the untrustworthy Russian scientist we tracked down in Israel, the inexplicable mix-up with the famous Allende meteorite, along with endless rounds of inconclusive testing and debate.

> The International Mineralogical Association Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification had just voted to accept our quasicrystal as a natural mineral. They also accepted our proposed name: "icosahedrite," a fitting name for the first known mineral with icosahedral symmetry to be entered into the official catalog.

> The grains, numbered from #1 to #120, ranged from less than a millimeter to a few millimeters in size. Glenn spent the next two hours reviewing the grains one by one … Glenn reported that in his opinion, none of the grains identified in the field appeared to resemble the original Florence sample.

> From that point on, I refused to entrust any delivery service with our Khatyrka samples. Nothing would ever be sent by express mail again, not even international packages to Luca in Italy.

> Luca meticulously prepared a proposal for the International Mineralogical Association. This time, however, he chose to hide everything from me. Luca had privately decided to name the new mineral "steinhardtite" in my honor. … While trying to recover more steinhardtite from the microscopic chips of Grain #126, Luca discovered something even better—a second kind of natural quasicrystal … Decagonite is a new mineral, but a familiar substance to quasicrystal experts. A quasicrystal with the same composition and symmetry had been synthesized by An-Pang Tsai and his collaborators in 1989, two years after they had created the world’s first bona fide example of a synthetic quasicrystal.

> The shock experiments were now so successful that they began taking on a life of their own. Occasionally, they created quasicrystals and other crystals with compositions that had never been seen before, either in nature or in the lab. That result has led Paul Asimow and me to consider using the gas gun to collide many other combinations of elements together, which will be a new and exciting way to search for new materials.

> The discovery of i-phase II represents the completely unanticipated third natural quasicrystal to be found in the Khatyrka meteorite samples. … With the discovery of i-phase II, my dream came true. For me, it is more important than any of the other natural quasicrystals we have discovered because it is the first one found in nature before being synthesized in the laboratory.

> The remarkable tiling on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran, can be viewed as a quasicrystal tiling composed of three shapes known as girih tiles ( )

Summary: A narrative of the search for a new form of matter, first theorized, then synthesized, and then first found in a mineral collection of questionable provenance that gave tantalizing hints that it might really exist.

This is a real science detective story. It has all the hopeful leads and unsettling reverses of a detective mystery, and one where the lead character, in this case the lead researcher, finds himself in a situation far removed from the normal environs of a theoretical physicist.

It begins with the question of whether an impossible five-fold symmetry could be possible under some circumstance. Then Paul Steinhardt, and a graduate student, Dov Levine, began began looking for a loophole to the forbidden five-fold symmetry, and found it, suggesting the possibility for something they termed quasi-crystals. Meanwhile, in another lab, a researcher synthesized a compound that turned out to have the predicted electron diffraction pattern. It takes the two labs a couple years to find out about each other but it demonstrates that something that seems impossible can actually exist, hence the title of this book, coming from Richard Feynman’s response to a paper by Steinhardt, who had been mentored by him. It was the kind of impossible that defies known knowledge but has an intriguing logic to it.

The next phase of Steinhardt’s research was to discover whether such a quasi-crystal actually exists in nature–the quest for a needle in a haystack as it were. He and a student comb mineral collections around the world, looking for promising diffraction patterns. They strike out over and over again until they find one sample in an Italian mineral collection administered by Luca Bindi. Part two of this book describes all the tests to confirm that this tiny sample indeed has a quasi-crystal imbedded in it and all the arguments against it. Then another sample is discovered in Russia, but the scientist, a Russian official, will not share it except for an exorbitant price. Furthermore, questions arise about both samples and their provenance–until the field researcher who actually found the material is discovered and agrees to help them find the tiny stream and collect additional samples.

The third part of the book is the trip to this stream, in a remote part of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Steinhardt, who has never done this kind of field work, is leader of the team, and against all the improbabilities, the challenges of mosquitoes, weather, bears, and the terrain, they find additional samples, leading to discoveries of other quasi-crystals, and clues to how this material was formed.

One of the fascinating qualities of this book was the quest that started with a theoretical question and eventually led to a remote peninsula of Kamchatka. For those not acquainted with the life of a research scientist, this account captures something of the excitement of pursuing a really interesting research question, how one question can lead to another, and the roadblocks and dead ends researchers sometimes encounter along the way. What we realize eventually is that all this takes over thirty years, and involves collaboration with a number of researchers from Russia, Italy, and all over the U.S. It is not the only research Steinhardt works on, but imagine spending most of one’s adult working life pursuing a research question. The combination of curiosity and sheer perseverance commands a certain kind of respect.

The other fascinating aspect of this book was understanding how research science works. Richard Feynman is not the only one to declare “impossible.” Some did so with outright opposition for good scientific reasons. This happens constantly in the submission of research papers and at scientific conferences. Steinhardt enlists his opponents on his research team, forming a “red team” and a “blue team” with opposing views. The opposing teams were good at recommending all the tests that would eliminate alternative possibilities. Eventually the opposition, formidable researchers in their own right, are convinced–but that took years.

This is a good book to illustrate the skepticism, the meticulous rigor, and the self-correcting character of scientific research at its best. The other wonderful aspect that arises out of this process is the international collaboration of people willing to share knowledge, samples, and credit, to advance a shared understanding of the world, indeed the universe. In short, this is a great book to see how science really works at its best. ( )