NEWSFLASH: Amazing Scientific Breakthrough Goes Way Over My Head

Via Slashdot, I learned today that some MIT scientists have discovered, actually created, a new form of matter: "a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity."

Most of us remember the three phases of matter from elementary-school science—solid, liquid, and gas. Until these MIT dudes (including the beefy, dreamy one on the right) made this form of matter, I knew of five phases of matter—the aforementioned and plasma, which you see just about every day in the form of fire, flourescent lighting, or gifts at the mall; and liquid crystals, which I only learned is a distinct phase of matter about a year-and-a-half ago when I wrote a paper on them for a chemistry class I took at art school (as you would suspect, a really, really easy class).

But this is physics, and physics is never that simple. I started Googling a bit to write this, and learned that there are actually plenty of phases. Ready?

• quark-gluon plasmas
• Bose-Einstein condensates
• fermionic condensates (the most recently discovered before MIT's discovery)
• strange matter
• superfluids
• supersolids
• paramagnetic and ferromagnetic phases of magnetic materials.

I'm not trying to educate. I'm simply pointing out how awed I am. I can't for the life of me figure out what all of this means. As I gather it, it's the highest temperature that a phase of matter can move without friction. However, when I delve into science, I am always amazed as the scope of the world. This certainly isn't an argument for intelligent design, but that nature seems limitless and that three dorks and a sweet slice of sexy man-cake can manipulate it in ways that defy natural order is magical. We should always debate the ethics of such manipulation (such as when genetic modification is appropriate or not), but such manipulation is always awe inspiring to me.