Hi friends, my guest this week is Professor Paul Steinhart from Princeton University and

despite being a physicist, the roller coaster that we're taking on today reads and he is

an awful lot more like a crime detective novel than like a typical science book.

I'm not going to give away too much with regards to what Professor Steinhart takes us through

today but suffice it to say that he's found a new type of matter and went on a journey all over the

world with the help of some crafty Russians, old lady in Amsterdam, a Romanian man called Tim

and an awful lot of other characters. It genuinely does sound and hear like something out of the

Da Vinci code but it's real life and it culminates in discovering an asteroid that no one has ever

found before and a type of matter that literally no one knew existed. So yeah, enjoy this, it's a mind

blower. Professor Steinhart, how are you today? Welcome to modern wisdom. Hi Chris, it's a pleasure to be here.

Absolutely fantastic to have you on. You're in good company. Some of your colleagues from across

the US have been unrecently. Well, I'm happy to be part of the crew. So what are we learning about today?

Well, I thought we might talk about the discovery of a new form of matter which I've written about in

a recent book just came out Simon and Schuster. It's called the second kind of impossible and

in one sense it's a science story about this new form of matter that people once thought was

impossible. They thought for centuries was impossible but it has a lot of other aspects to the story.

It's one of the stranger scientific stories you're likely to come across. Wow, so a new kind of matter.

Yes, so there's always been this question about what ways that exist for atoms and molecules to come

together to make a piece of matter. How they arrange themselves is very important to how they

behave, how that matter behaves and what it's useful for. It depends partly on the particular

kinds of atoms, the chemistry, what particular combination of elements you have, but it also depends

on how they're arranged. So for example, we can take carbon. If you arrange it one way, it makes

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