Welcome to the quantum science podcast.

Each episode we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

For 50 years, physicists have understood current as a flow of charged particles,

but a new experiment has found that in at least one strange

material, this understanding falls apart. That's next.

It's season three of the joy of why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call

time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here. Astrophysicist and co-host. Ready for

anything. That's right. I'm bringing in the A team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn.

I'm Janelleleven. I'm Steve Stroggatz. And this is Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why.

New episodes drop every other Thursday.

After a year of trial and error, Lee Yang Chen had managed to whittle down a metallic wire into

a microscopic strand half the width of an E. coli bacterium. It was just thin enough to allow a

trickle of electric current to pass through. Chen hoped the drips of that current might help

settle a persistent mystery about how charge

moves through a bewildering class of materials known as strange metals.

Chin, then a grad student, and his collaborators at Rice University, measured the current flowing

through their atoms-thin strand of metal.

And they found that it flowed

smoothly and evenly. In fact, it flowed so evenly that it defied physicist's standard conception

of electricity and metals. Canonically, electric current results from the collective movement of

electrons, each carrying one indivisible chunk of electric

...