Solid or Liquid? Physicists Redefine States of Matter (physics)
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The answer seems simple enough: Liquids flow. Solids don’t. The atoms in liquids can slosh around. In solids, they fall lockstep into a crystal lattice. A crystal’s endlessly repeating pattern is so stable that it takes a considerable infusion of energy to make the atoms break rank. Or so physics textbooks say.
But this long-accepted explanation for the rigidity of solids fails to account for quasicrystals — bizarre solids first discovered in the lab in 1982 and found in nature in 2009.
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