http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18825201.100

Solids that can pass through solids
08 October 2005
Catherine Zandonella
Magazine issue 2520

Welcome to a world where teacups melt through saucers and everyone
walks through walls IS it possible to walk through walls? Can solid objects really pass
through each other? Moses Chan thinks they can, and he says he has the proof.
Chan and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University have created the
world's first "supersolids", bizarre crystals that slide through each other
like ghosts. It is a finding that promises to revolutionise the way we think
about matter. "It really changes one's concept of solids," says Jason
Ho, a solid-state theorist at Ohio State University in Columbus.

The idea that one solid object can flow through another contradicts all
our everyday experiences: no one has ever seen a teacup dissolve through a
saucer. And when you prop up the bar on Friday nights there is no
danger of you slowly melting into the surface and falling out the other side.

Solids get their reassuring rigidness from the orderly way their atoms
are arranged. Unlike ...

(The complete article is 2431 words long.
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