Welcome to the Quanta Audio Edition. In each of these bi-weekly episodes, we bring you a story

direct from the Quanta website about developments in basic science and mathematics. I'm Susan Vallett.

He is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have now shown that there is a substance that is truly heat-proof, and

it's an idealized form of magnetism.

That's next.

Quantum Magazine is an editorially independent online publication supported by the Simon's

Foundation to enhance public understanding of science.

Sunlight melt snowflakes. Fire turns logs into soot and smoke. A hot oven will make a magnet lose its pole.

Physicists know from countless examples that if you crank the temperature high enough,

structures and patterns break down.

Now though, they've cooked up a striking exception.

In a string of results over the past few years, researchers have shown that an idealized

substance resembling two intermingled magnets

can, in theory, maintain an orderly pattern no matter how hot it gets. The discovery might

influence cosmology or affect the quest to bring quantum phenomena to room temperature.

Fabi and Reneke is a researcher at the Institute for

Theoretical Physics in Gieson, Germany, who wasn't involved in the work. He says the idea that

such an effect is possible, even if only in theory, hits you in the face because it's not what you

expect. York Schmalion, a physicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, is intrigued, too.

He says he's thinking about how to find a concrete realization of this framework.

The discovery was sparked by an audience question at a lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2019. Zohar Komar Gottsky,

a physicist visiting from Stony Brook University, had commented that any form of order,

...