All the quasicrystals we have found on earth are apparently meteorite fragments.
If you ever want to hear an incredible, adventurous science talk, listen to Paul Steinhardt talk about leading an expedition into Kamchatka to find them:
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39. Most materials expand in one direction when you compress them in a perpendicular direction. But AUXETICS are materials that either shrink or expand in both directions simultaneously.
(In engineering terms, they have a negative "Poisson ratio")
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There are lots of fun engineering examples of auxetics. But they also appear naturally. Here's one, for example ("cristobalite", a variant of quartz):
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40. OPTICAL METAMATERIALS are human-made materials in which a bunch of small electromagnetic resonators are arranged so that their interactions produce unusual behaviors of light (or EM waves in some band of frequency). For example, you can engineer negative index of refraction!
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41. There is a lot of excitement and mystery right now about SAMARIUM HEXABORIDE, which looks simultaneously like an insulator and a quantum metal, in ways that we are still grappling with.
See this earlier thread: (twitter.com/gravity_levity)
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30/30 Since this is a paper whose major point is mostly to rain on a fun quantum hype parade, I expect it to be essentially ignored.
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I think that I am out of time and energy now, and tired of spamming your timelines. So let's draw this thread to an
END.
Thank you all for coming along with me. It's been fun, and nothing at all like a systematic list of "the 100 most interesting materials".
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I didn't get to 100, but this thread has at least 100 tweets in it and I am now reporting for debriefing
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To be honest, this thread felt much better for my soul than last year's thread of "100 takes"
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I think it worked fine, but all the opinionating made me feel dirty
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Bear in mind:
twitter.com/vgr/status/120
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