The Second Kind of Impossible

by Paul Steinhardt

  Razin hemmed and hawed again, until . . . “I don’t remember.”

  I looked up again from my notes. The big red flag had just exploded in flames.

  Razin claimed that he had personally found the sample. The same sample in which he claimed to have discovered unique new minerals. Unique new materials that he had established as a holotype in the St. Petersburg Mining Museum, and that he had submitted to the International Mineralogical Association for acceptance as a new mineral.

  Now he was telling me that he had no particular memory about where he found it?

  I continued down my list of questions. “Do you have any more samples?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he responded. “Maybe in Moscow.”

  Within seconds, I had a travel website pulled up on my computer screen and was checking the cost of a round-trip ticket from Tel Aviv to Moscow. Less than $500. Not bad, I thought.

  “Would you be willing to fly to Moscow,” I asked, “to look for your geological field notebook and any additional samples? I would cover the cost of the flight and the accommodations.”

  “Maybe,” was the muted response.

  The translator and I tried to figure out what “maybe” meant.

  Was there a health issue? No. Was there a political issue? No. Was he reluctant for other reasons to visit Russia? No. He had traveled back and forth several times since emigrating to Israel.

  It finally dawned on us that Razin might be looking for a reward.

  I tried to explain to him that we were academic scientists studying minerals with virtually no market value. We were in search of tiny samples of aluminum-copper-iron alloys, samples that would be financially worthless but scientifically priceless.

  We had very limited funds, I continued. We could cover his travel expenses to Moscow, but could not afford to pay a financial reward.

  I was hoping Razin would appreciate the opportunity to make a contribution to science. Instead he became quiet and unresponsive. The phone call ended soon thereafter.

  For the next few days, I carefully weighed all of my options and considered how I might best appeal to Razin. I asked Dov Levine, my former student, for advice. It had been twenty-five years since Dov and I had invented the concept of quasicrystals. He was now a professor at the Technion in Haifa, and a trusted colleague.

  Dov put me in contact with one of his Russian friends in Haifa, who agreed to speak with Razin about his demands. Perhaps there was a way, I thought, to come up with a small remuneration.

  But the request that came back through an intermediary from Razin seemed outrageous. What he wanted was far beyond what I could possibly afford to pay. Dov’s friend tried to convince me otherwise. He told me that many Russian émigrés in Israel were having financial problems. Razin was a credible scientist, he said, and deserved my generosity.

  But I was worried about Razin. He had managed to make a very bad impression on me during our telephone call. I had no doubt that Razin could dig up some sort of geological notebook if I sent him to Moscow. Based on our conversation, though, I was not confident it would be authentic.

  I struggled for several days with the painful decision, but finally decided to break contact with Razin.

  With our last-ditch effort in total ruin, Luca and I were truly despondent. How could we ever hope to learn the origin of the St. Petersburg holotype? And without finding that information, how could we ever manage to establish the authenticity of the Florence sample? And without authenticating our sample of khatyrkite, how could we ever prove that the quasicrystal we had discovered was not a fake?

  I thought Luca and I had landed at the lowest of all possible low points. Unfortunately, I was mistaken. Things were about to get even worse.

  TWELVE

  * * *

  A CAPRICIOUS IF NOT OVERTLY MALICIOUS GOD

  PRINCETON AND FLORENCE, LATE APRIL 2009: Months of detective work had failed and the blue team was becoming increasingly desperate.

  With nowhere else to turn, Luca and I were forced to circle back to the beginning. We still had fifty to one hundred minuscule grains left to study and each of them would be time-consuming and excruciatingly difficult to analyze. Not only were the tiny grains hard to manipulate, but many of them contained combinations of minerals that were so complicated that they would require several days, in some cases several weeks, to fully investigate.

  The total amount of material was smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. But no matter how hard we worked, we knew it would be physically impossible to get through all the grains before the Science magazine deadline, which was now less than two months away.

  It did not help that Luca and I had to pursue the investigation while juggling other research projects, regular teaching commitments, and travel to conferences and speaking engagements. For example, as director of the Natural History Museum at the University of Florence, Luca was drawn into planning an elaborate posthumous tribute for Curzio Cipriani, the former museum director. Cipriani was Luca’s close friend and collaborator. He had spent half a century curating the minerals in the Florence collection.

  Cipriani’s widow, Marta, was also helping plan her husband’s memorial. One day, after an organizational meeting, she and Luca struck up a conversation. Luca told her about the history of our project and bemoaned our current situation. We had run out of leads to pursue, and were running out of material to study. As a result, we were now in serious jeopardy of running out of time.

  Marta quietly nodded and listened sympathetically. Luca mentioned that our investigation centered around a sample from the museum’s Koekkoek collection. And at that, her eyes lit up. She knew that her late husband was personally responsible for that acquisition and had especially loved the Koekkoek minerals. So without hesitation, she decided to reveal one of his biggest secrets. Her husband often brought minerals home from work, Marta told Luca, in order to study them more thoroughly in a private laboratory he had assembled in their basement.

  Removing samples from the museum was strictly forbidden. Even a well-respected museum director like Cipriani was not exempt from those rules. So Luca was stunned by the revelation. But he was also intrigued. If Cipriani had loved the Koekkoek collection so much, there might be important clues to be found in his personal lab. So Luca eagerly accepted Marta’s invitation to visit their home the very next day.

  Luca found that Cipriani, ever the professional, had been meticulous in his lab work. He had carefully logged all the details in his notebook so it was easy for Luca to quickly thumb through the well-organized pages. On one of the pages, khatyrkite was faithfully marked with the familiar number 4061, the same number found on the box of khatyrkite that Luca had originally recovered from the museum’s storage room.

  Looking around his mentor’s secret lab, Luca was surprised to see that Cipriani had managed to gather a large collection of materials, more than a hundred samples, and had stored each of them in its own plastic box. Digging through the vast assortment, Luca uncovered a box containing a small vial labeled 4061-Khatyrkite. Inside the vial was a tiny bit of powdery material. Cipriani had apparently scraped off a few bits of the original sample and taken it home to his secret lab, where it had presumably sat undisturbed for years.

  When Luca emailed me the news, I was astonished by our good luck.

  Suddenly there was more khatyrkite to study! From exactly the same source that contained a natural quasicrystal !

  I was certain that Cipriani’s secret collection would help establish the authenticity of the khatyrkite sample and the natural quasicrystal nested within. This reversal of fortune felt like a miracle. If we were lucky, we would discover an abundance of direct contacts between the quasicrystal and the other natural minerals, which was exactly the kind of proof Lincoln and Glenn had been repeatedly demanding.

  Luca and I were so convinced about the importance of the find that we decided to send it to Glenn MacPherson right away. We wanted to give the red team’s biggest skeptic first crack at the p
ristine material, wagering it was the best way to convince him that the Florence sample was natural.

  Luca mailed the powdery material to the Smithsonian the very next day. We sat back eagerly awaiting Glenn’s reaction, along with the treasure trove of research he was sure to provide. The blue team was about to prevail! The only thing that could match my profound sense of excitement was my profound sense of relief that we were now on the verge of success.

  * * *

  WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 12, 2009: Ten days later, I received Glenn’s email. But it was not the congratulatory note we had been expecting. I froze when I read the first line:

  I now am coming to believe in a capricious, if not overtly malicious, God.

  What? No! I thought. I began to read the rest of the note. It was not good news.

  I have looked at both grains. Both particles are pieces of the Allende meteorite . . . the whole thing is enclosed in fine-grained material that can only have come from the Allende meteorite matrix or a virtually identical CV3 carbonaceous chondrite meteorite. I have spent 30 years looking at Allende, and this is it or its twin. This cannot have anything to do with the khatyrkite-cupalite material. . . . And assuming this is Allende, the purported find locality (Siberia) is something like 8000–10000 miles away from where the meteorite fell (northern Mexico). If this were a clast from the meteorite, then I’d say the presence of aluminum-copper alloys suggests that you have a piece of 6-billion-year-old alien spacecraft that became trapped in our infant solar system when it formed. . . . Paul, I do not know what to say. Based on what I now know, I’d say withdraw the paper until such time as we can come up with relevant evidence. . . . For my part, I am so flabbergasted that I am going home and have a good stiff drink. Under any other circumstances (and 40 years ago), I’d start looking around for Allen Funt and Candid Camera. Someone, somewhere is messing with my mind.

  I knew the last-minute miracle from Cipriani’s secret laboratory was now an unmitigated disaster. And I was right.

  As one of the world’s leading experts on the Allende meteorite, Glenn had immediately identified its unmistakable signature in the powdery material from Cipriani’s vial. The Allende meteorite, named for its landing site near Allende, Mexico, entered the atmosphere and struck Earth on February 8, 1969. Glenn had spent years exploring every nook and cranny of Allende, because of the secrets it carries about the birth of our solar system.

  Some cosmologists believe the universe sprang from nothing in a big bang that occurred 13.8 billion years ago. Others think that the bang might actually have been a bounce, a transition from an earlier epoch of contraction to the current period of expansion, in which case the universe could be much older. In either case, cosmologists agree that 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was much hotter and denser than the core of the sun. Space was filled with a hot gas teeming with freely moving protons, neutrons, and electrons. As space expanded and the hot gas cooled, the elementary particles that had been hurtling around freely began to clump together to form atoms and molecules, dust, planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and clusters and clusters of galaxies. About nine billion years later, in the galaxy known as the Milky Way, our solar system began to form from a dust cloud composed of the remains of earlier generations of stars. Enough matter fell into the center of the dust cloud to form our emergent sun. The remaining dust swirling around the sun slowly coalesced, condensed into the planets, asteroids, and other objects we observe orbiting the sun today.

  The Allende meteorite, along with other meteorites known as “CV3 carbonaceous chondrites,” formed more than 4.5 billion years ago at the birth of our solar system, just as the sun was igniting. Samples are highly coveted because they provide scientists with extremely valuable information about the chemical and physical conditions that existed at that time.

  Glenn had studied Allende samples long enough and thoroughly enough to recognize one in his sleep. So he was understandably shocked to find that Cipriani had mistakenly slipped powdery material from the well-known Allende into a vial of a very unremarkable material labeled 4061-Khatyrkite. How could Cipriani have possibly mixed up the Florence museum sample with such a famously recognizable material? Whatever the circumstances, Glenn found it inexcusable.

  Luca was dumbfounded and mortified. I was more sanguine. To me, it was merely the latest downturn in an already wildly fluctuating investigation. After all, we could never know what experiments Cipriani had been conducting in his home laboratory. Yes, the 4061 label was a match to the museum label. But all of our meaningful data had been drawn from the other 4061 sample, the carefully preserved museum sample of khatyrkite that was clearly not a piece of the Allende meteorite.

  Glenn viewed the situation differently. He made it clear to us that he considered the fiasco a shameful point of no return. He had now lost confidence in everything originating in Florence. Why should he trust the original museum sample? The entire museum, he asserted, could be riddled with misidentified samples and fakes.

  Worst of all, Glenn decided that he was now vehemently opposed to publishing the Science paper and lobbied to make sure that the red team presented a unified front. He sent Lincoln a copy of his incendiary email about a capricious if not malicious God, effectively suggesting that he join the resistance.

  * * *

  PRINCETON, MAY 15, 2009: I knew that the Science manuscript was already in the hands of the copy editor and speeding toward publication. So Glenn’s reaction to the Cipriani incident presented a dilemma. As team leader, I would have to make a difficult decision that would affect everyone’s professional reputation: Publish or withdraw the Science manuscript?

  As skeptics, the red team’s mission was to help prevent us from fooling ourselves, as Feynman had warned. Lincoln and Glenn were terrific collaborators. But their friendly opposition was mushrooming into open revolt.

  How could we possibly publish our discovery without their support? I thought.

  Since neither Lincoln nor Glenn were listed as coauthors, it was not their decision to make. At the same time, Luca and I had no desire to discount their opinions. They were knowledgeable, important advisors who had contributed greatly to every aspect of the research we had conducted since the original discovery.

  There were, however, two other official coauthors to consult, Peter Lu and Nan Yao. Ten years ago, Peter had helped me canvass the worldwide database of minerals. Five months earlier, I had collaborated with Nan Yao, the brilliant microscopist and director of the Princeton Imaging Center, in making the initial discovery.

  Peter advocated that we publish immediately. He expressed confidence that the sample was natural based on his impressions of the only available images of the original piece of museum khatyrkite. Nan declined to vote, and deferred to the blue team’s scientific judgment.

  I weighed all the opinions against the evidence in hand and quickly settled on a course of action. But I purposely waited before reaching out to Lincoln and Glenn. Tempers were running hot, and I wanted to give the red team a chance to cool down so we could hold a dispassionate discussion.

  In a series of meetings and phone calls, I reminded them about the thick notebook of observations and data that we had collected on the Florence museum sample. All of it favored the conclusion that the sample was natural.

  Both Lincoln and Glenn conceded that was true.

  Next, I argued, the Cipriani incident was irrelevant. Perhaps it was true that Cipriani brought samples home from the museum and subsequently bungled their handling. But ultimately, the Cipriani experience did not prove or disprove anything. We should just ignore it, I contended. All of the observations and data in the Science paper were strictly limited to the original sample of khatyrkite that had been carefully tracked and properly curated in the Florence museum.

  Of course, Glenn had become suspicious of everything originating in Florence, including the museum sample. When pressed, though, he had to admit that there was not a shred of evidence that anything in the museum was tainted.r />
  Finally, I summarized what appeared to me to be the essential point on which everyone could agree: The preponderance of the evidence indicated that the Florence sample of khatyrkite and the quasicrystals within it were natural. Neither Lincoln nor Glenn could disagree with that conclusion.

  But this was the full extent of what we were claiming in the paper, I argued. We did not claim absolute proof that the quasicrystal was natural. In accordance with their concerns, we included a warning that the presence of minerals with metallic aluminum, including the quasicrystal, was a serious challenge to explain. We claimed no definitive explanation, we were merely presenting all of the evidence to date. We acknowledged that the presence of aluminum could mean the sample was a by-product of human activity. At the same time, though, we also presented substantial experimental evidence favoring the alternate theory, which was the admittedly daring hypothesis that the quasicrystals had formed naturally.

  I have always believed that a paper that honestly presents the supporting evidence along with a clear warning about its limitations is scientifically responsible. I also believed that publishing our discovery would allow other scientists to weigh in with more evidence or with better ideas that could help explain the baffling existence of the Florence sample.

  Luca completely agreed with my analysis. Lincoln and Glenn, however, strongly disagreed with me and their stubborn opposition revealed the true nature of the scientific conflict. They were concerned that a theoretical physicist, meaning me, was applying a lower standard than the petrologist and the meteorite expert, meaning themselves. In their view, the paper should not be published unless and until we could definitively rule out the possibility that the metallic aluminum alloys were man-made. No matter how long it would take to accomplish that.

  For Lincoln and Glenn, the remaining uncertainty outweighed the preponderance of evidence. I finally realized that there was no amount of careful writing or full disclosure on my part that could ever compensate. With so many unanswered questions, they both expressed the concern that the paper could turn into a professional embarrassment and, at one point, explicitly asked that I withdraw their names from the acknowledgments or at least change the acknowledgments so that it was clear that they disapproved of the conclusions.