"I knew this could cause trouble."
A 30-year debate has just been reignited by a physicist who appears to have found a mysterious new state of matter in an ordinary piece of glass.
For decades, this unexplained phase transition has been sought in real-life materials, and now that we have evidence for it, scientists around the world are trying to understand what it could mean for all kinds of disordered systems in the Universe, from liquids and gases, to grains and galaxies.
The discovery, led by physicist Sho Yaida from Duke University, could take the strange new state of matter out of the hypothetical realm of infinite dimensions, and into reality.
And it’s created quite a stir in the physics community.
“We found hints of the transition that we didn’t dare say was evidence of the transition because part of the community said that it could not exist,” says one of the team, Patrick Charbonneau.
“What Sho shows is that it can exist.”
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