Bob Novella

Bob, start us off with a quickie.

Thank you, Steve.

This is your Quickie with Bob.

So I saw this news item titled from Science Daily.

Scientists just created exotic new forms of matter that shouldn't exist.

It really just pissed me off.

No, they did not create impossible matter in a lab.

But oh, well, the headline still caught my attention and I clicked it.

So I guess they achieved their goal.

Yeah.

The actual science behind it is fascinating.

Guys, researchers have shown that tiny quantum systems that we all love, right, we all love these things, behave in ways that would not be possible if they were just sitting there under typical static conditions, right?

The trick, they say, is to drive the system

with something that's like a precisely timed changing magnetic field.

And when you do that, something really amazing happens.

So a useful analogy here is a swing on a swing set.

Okay, we all know what that is.

If the swing just sits there, it does nothing, right?

It's just not doing much.

If you push it randomly, it'll move for sure, but it's probably going to move in like a sloppy kind of unhelpful way.