The Second Kind of Impossible

by Paul Steinhardt

  The fact that the metal had melted but not reacted with oxygen in the melted silicate was also significant. Melted metal is normally highly reactive because the metal atoms are free to move around and chemically react with any oxygen atoms that happen to be in their surroundings. But here was a clear-cut case of melted aluminum making contact with an oxygen-rich liquid silicate and not reacting.

  A logical explanation was that the metal solidified ultra-rapidly, before it could react with the oxygen bonded to the silicate. Ultra-rapid cooling would also explain the oddly contorted shapes. Yet rapid cooling at such a high rate would not normally occur as part of any natural process on the surface of the Earth or in an ordinary laboratory.

  Thanks to the images recovered from the hard drive, Luca and I were able to conclude that the list of possible sources of the Florence sample was narrowing. Everything now pointed to a natural origin.

  * * *

  AMSTERDAM, NOVEMBER 2009: Buoyed by our recent success recovering the computer images from the broken hard drive but frustrated by our failure to find Tim the Romanian, Luca and I decided to try something that had almost no chance of succeeding. Luca would go back to Amsterdam and ask Debora, the recalcitrant widow of the Dutch mineral collector, if she knew anything about Tim.

  This time around, Debora was more comfortable with Luca and invited him into her home. After exchanging pleasantries, he got right to the point: Had she ever heard her husband Nico refer to anyone from Romania named Tim?

  Debora’s answer was straightforward and direct: No.

  Luca persisted, though, remembering how long it had taken Roberto to extract information from her. He explained to Debora that her late husband had mentioned Tim by first name in the diary she had shown Roberto. So he was probably someone very familiar.

  Perhaps she recalled a story her husband told her about his adventures in Romania? No, Debora insisted.

  And so the conversation went. No matter how many different ways Luca tried to broach the topic, Debora’s answer was always the same. She had never heard her husband mention anything about anyone named Tim.

  Then, just as Luca was about to give up, Debora quietly made a startling confession. Her husband kept a second diary, a SECRET secret diary. The second diary was apparently Koekkoek’s way of keeping track of purchases he knew had questionable legality, including minerals obtained under suspicious circumstances. He did not want to create a paper trail about those transactions in his official records. Debora had apparently been too nervous or too embarrassed to have mentioned it earlier. But now, she quickly retrieved the SECRET secret diary from the next room and gave it to Luca. Once the diary was in his hands, it did not take long for him to find what he was looking for.

  The entry translated as follows:

  Most metals minerals present in my small collection of fragments were conveyed to me through Tim.

  The opening line was consistent with Koekkoek’s first diary. But the rest of the entry offered something new:

  Tim is obtaining minerals in the laboratory Rudashevsky. The minerals were given primarily to Tim by L. Razin (director at major center in Russia) a man who worked in the laboratory Rudashevsky.

  It must have been hard for Luca to maintain his composure. All of the names in the SECRET secret diary were well known to us by now. Two of them were scientists who featured prominently in the khatyrkite story. Evidence of their connection to Nico Koekkoek came as an utter shock.

  Razin. Based on Koekkoek’s diary entry, the Florence sample was not just chemically similar to the St. Petersburg holotype. It came directly from the same source, Leonid Razin, the uncooperative scientist we tracked down in Israel who claimed to have personally discovered the sample.

  Rudashevsky. Luca and I knew Nikolai Rudashevsky to be the electron microscopist who had worked with many Russian mineralogists in his St. Petersburg lab. In exchange for his efforts, Rudashevsky was often given credit as coauthor on their scientific papers. In 1985, one of the papers he coauthored with Razin described the discovery of khatyrkite and cupalite.

  Koekkoek’s mention of the two Russian scientists meant that both the Florence sample and the holotype sample in the St. Petersburg Mining Museum must have come from the same place—a remote area of Eastern Russia that was far from any aluminum foundries or sophisticated laboratories that could have produced the samples artificially.

  The St. Petersburg holotype, of course, was already certified by the International Mineralogical Association to be of natural origin. If the two samples came from the same place, it was reasonable to suppose that the Florence sample was natural, as well. Luca and I were certain that Koekkoek’s SECRET secret diary was a watershed moment that was about to help us prove our case for the first-ever natural quasicrystal.

  FOURTEEN

  * * *

  VALERY KRYACHKO

  PRINCETON AND FLORENCE, NOVEMBER 2009: According to Nico Koekkoek’s SECRET secret diary, Leonid Razin was the source of the Florence khatyrkite sample. He was also the lead author of the paper describing the St. Petersburg holotype.

  But how did Razin obtain the two samples?

  Razin claimed that he had recovered the minerals in 1979 in a remote, uninhabited region of Far Eastern Russia. But I knew that an expedition to Kamchatka would have entailed considerable inconvenience. Based on my experience with Razin, I doubted his claim.

  At the time, Razin was head of the Soviet Union’s Institute of Platinum in Moscow. Colleagues believed he had strong family connections to both the KGB and the Communist Party, which controlled every aspect of daily life in the former Soviet Union. Those who may have been personally close to operatives in the KGB, the security agency that later became the FSB, were thought to be capable of destroying other people’s lives.

  It seemed unlikely that such a high-ranking, politically connected person accustomed to city life would decide to embark on a taxing mission to such a desolate location. I was convinced the actual fieldwork must have been done by an underling.

  But who was it?

  * * *

  ST. PETERSBURG, NOVEMBER 2009: Koekkoek’s diary suggested that Razin had been working with Nicolai Rudashevsky’s lab when a sample of khatyrkite had been smuggled out of the country. I managed to track down Rudashevsky, who was by then in his eighties and still living in St. Petersburg with his family. His son Vladimir was fluent in English and served as our intermediary. Vladimir had followed his father’s footsteps into science and had become a successful entrepreneur in the minerals industry. He was proud of his father’s accomplishments, understood the scientific ramifications of our research, and was fully supportive of our impossible quest.

  Vladimir spent hours talking to his elderly father about our investigation, but failed to jog his memory about the work he had performed more than thirty years earlier on khatyrkite and cupalite. That was not completely surprising; Razin’s samples were not particularly noteworthy at the time, and Rudashevsky’s lab had conducted hundreds, if not thousands, of tests on other materials since.

  Stymied, Vladimir tried to come up with another way to help us. I had told him about my surprisingly difficult encounter with Leonid Razin. Acting in his father’s stead, Vladimir offered to call Razin directly to see if he could make some headway. I warily agreed, hoping that a personal entreaty from a former colleague’s son who was himself a fellow scientist would coax Razin into cooperating.

  But Vladimir’s conversation with Razin was even more disastrous than mine. Razin had originally tried to stonewall me because I would not pay his exorbitant fee. Now, he was enraged to learn that Vladimir was trying to help me get the information for free. Vladimir told me that Razin had become so furious during their telephone call that he had tried to intimidate him by reminding him about his political connections.

  I was taken aback by the threat. I had been warned by Razin’s former colleagues that he could be malevolent. So now I became worried that a harmless scientific investigation might result in harm to t
he Rudashevsky family. Even though he was living in Israel, it seemed possible that Razin might have a long reach.

  When I tried to apologize to Vladimir for exposing him and his father to potential danger, he just laughed. He told me he was confident that Razin was making an idle threat. And indeed, nothing ever happened to the Rudashevskys. Even so, Luca and I took the matter to heart and vowed to avoid any future contact with Leonid Razin.

  * * *

  FLORENCE AND PRINCETON, DECEMBER 2009: Luca and I must have read the original scientific paper announcing the discovery of khatyrkite and cupalite a thousand times. The first paragraph always seemed strangely cryptic.

  It mentions a person (the first highlight below) named V. V. Kryachko, who discovered some unidentified grains while panning in the Listvenitovyi Stream (the second highlight). The paragraph never elaborates about the panning or explains exactly how it was related to the discovery of khatyrkite and cupalite. Secondly, the mysterious Kryachko character was never mentioned again and was not listed as a coauthor. That omission would seem to indicate that Kryachko was not significant to the discovery. So, if that was the case, why mention him or her at all? Thirdly, despite our most rigorous searching, we had never been able to find the mysterious Listvenitovyi Stream on a map.

  Did this person or this place really exist?

  A leading Russian academician told us there was a very simple possible explanation: Maybe Kryachko was a fictional character and the Listvenitovyi Stream was a fictional place?

  Razin was director of the Institute of Platinum, our contact reminded us. He was searching for valuable ore metals and may have been trying to obscure all the details for competitive reasons. Even though khatyrkite and cupalite were not marketable, Razin’s competitors would have guessed that they were discovered during the Institute’s search for platinum. If Razin had accurately documented the events and locale, adversaries might have been able to glean enough information to raid the valuable deposits. So it would be practically mandatory for Razin to create a fictional story to throw his competitors off track.

  The explanation sounded plausible in a strange sort of unscientific way.

  We double-checked the “fictional” theory with another Russian academician, who promptly disagreed. He assured us that Mr. Kryachko was not an imaginary character, but rather a known mineralogist. Sadly, he reported, Kryachko had died several years earlier.

  With two disparate theories now in hand, we checked with a third Russian academician and received yet a third explanation. He reported that Kryachko was a Chukchi, one of the indigenous people in Chukotka. Kryachko would have been hired to assist Razin’s expedition and would have long since returned to his village in the tundra. Finding him would be a hopeless endeavor, we were told. And since he was merely a helper, he would not have any useful information for us.

  So according to the experts, V. V. Kryachko was either a fictional person, a deceased person, or an untraceable person. Whatever the truth, it made no difference. The bottom line was that we were never going to make contact. Luca and I moved on.

  Months after giving up on Kryachko, Luca and I accidentally stumbled across the name again in a different context. We were poring through a vast literature on Russian mining ores when Luca spotted an obscure article on platinum-group minerals discovered in the Koryak Mountains. The paper was coauthored by none other than V. V. Kryachko.

  The same exact name? In the same exact region? Studying closely related minerals?

  We were sure it was not a coincidence. But there was no information listed about V. V. Kryachko, not even a professional affiliation. So there was no way of telling if he was still alive.

  We turned to the paper’s coauthor, Vadim Distler, whom we identified as a leading researcher at IGEM, the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Geology of Ore Deposits, Petrography, Mineralogy, and Geochemistry in Moscow.

  My email to Vadim went unanswered for several weeks, long enough for me to worry that we had reached another frustrating dead end. When he finally responded to my note, Vadim apologized for the delay and explained that he had been unable to get to his office because of a personal illness and the harsh winter weather in Moscow. We made an appointment to talk on the telephone, and I recruited a Russian colleague at Princeton to help translate.

  When we finally connected, I began by trying to find out if we had the right person. Did Vadim know if his coauthor, V. V. Kryachko, was the same person mentioned in Razin’s paper? I was desperate for good news, because we were running out of ideas and this was our only potential lead.

  I held my breath waiting for Vadim’s response. “Da!” was his reply. I threw up my arms in victory.

  The rest of the conversation was a gold mine. V. V. Kryachko was Valery Kryachko. Decades earlier, Vadim had been Valery’s PhD thesis advisor at the Institute of Geology of Ore Deposits. One summer before Valery had entered graduate school, Leonid Razin had offered him an opportunity to gain some valuable field experience. In 1979, Razin had sent young Valery to the Listvenitovyi Stream to search for platinum.

  I felt a smile come over my face as the sentence was translated. Here was the simple explanation that connected all of the seemingly disparate elements.

  Leonid Razin, the Institute of Platinum, Valery Kryachko, a student sent on an expedition, the Listvenitovyi Stream.

  I dreaded the answer to the next question but had to ask: Is Valery still alive? After what felt like an interminable pause, I heard Vadim’s response, “Da!”

  I could barely contain my excitement. Valery is alive? I thought. If I could manage to find him, he might be able to explain how the samples had been found. We could finally answer all the questions Razin had been trying to bluff his way through.

  While all these thoughts were racing through my mind, Vadim continued speaking with the translator. “Valery is planning to come to Moscow to visit me at the end of the month,” he said. “Would you like me to have him contact you?”

  I looked at the translator in disbelief. Are you kidding? I laughed. Tell him “Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes!”

  * * *

  PRINCETON AND MOSCOW, RUSSIA, JANUARY 7, 2010: One year and five days after we discovered the first natural quasicrystal in a Princeton laboratory, I managed to establish direct communication with Valery Kryachko, the scientist who had pulled the sample out of the ground more than thirty years earlier in Kamchatka.

  I sent him an email with a list of questions that would help Luca and me determine the legitimacy of the Florence khatyrkite sample. His initial note was more than I could have ever hoped for:

  УважаемъІй профессор Пол Стейнхардт! Благoдарю за ваше письмо. Я внимательно слежу за дискуссией вокруг условий образованпя квазикристалов и хатеркита в частности, поэтому хорошо представляю значимость этой находки и с . . .

  Which in full text translates to:

  Dear Professor Paul Steinhardt!

  Thank you for your letter. I am carefully watching the debate about the formation conditions for quasicrystals and khatyrkite, so I can well imagine the significance of this finding and, with pleasure, will help to ensure that you understand the conditions for the formation of khatyrkite. You may use the information I have provided you with no restrictions.

  In 1979, I did expeditionary research work in the Russia Academy of Sciences as a researcher for the North-East Scientific Research Institute, Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Magadan. The plan was for a large expedition, but, because of bad weather, the only ones who arrived at the Iomrautvaam River were me and a student from Yakutsk. I conducted the work at the Listvenitovyi Stream, a small stream which is no more than a mile in length and is the right tributary of the Iomrautvaam River. This is a unique stream, despite its small size. For several years it was a place to search for placer gold. The year before my arrival, it was
completely depleted. The stream bed was flattened by a bulldozer. As a result, on the left side of the creek was bared a meter-thick layer of blue-green clay, probably a serpentinite by-product, a chemical weathering crust. Washing it was extremely difficult but it could be done with hot water. I washed more than 150 kilograms of material. After washing in a heavy mineral concentrate, this mineral was found that immediately attracted attention. It was a pyramid 4 mm in height and 4 mm at the base. I was attracted by its bright silver color, whiter than native platinum metals, but lighter in weight. Arriving in Magadan, I gave this sample to LV Razin, because he was the team leader for the study of platinum deposits which included me. After a time he told me that this was not a platinum mineral: I had found four new phases of aluminum-based minerals. The next year, Razin left the institute and moved to another city. I never met him again. Years later came the publication of khatyrkite and cupalite as new minerals by Razin.

  I think that there has been no geological study of Listvenitovyi Stream except for mine. And, most likely, nobody brought khatyrkite from there. Many questions about the nature of the formation of this clay remain unresolved. It is present in the stream in large quantities. Organization of an expedition to study the creek is possible. From this place to Anadyr is about 200 kilometers. I am very familiar with the area. The stream is not marked on the map you sent me, but I will try to show the place, using images from satellites and send them to you shortly.

  Sincerely VV (Valery) Kryachko

  Valery’s detailed response, along with his answers to my follow-up questions in later emails, proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that Valery Kryachko, not Leonid Razin, was the person who had recovered khatyrkite samples from the Listvenitovyi Stream during the summer of 1979.