What the Creation of Exotic Matter on the ISS Means for the Future of Science

Space Exotica, and more Adventures on the International Space Station

A 5-Minuter from Wonk Bridge

Radiation observed from the pulsar PSR B1509−58. Pulsars such as this one and J1614–2230 have been adjudged by scientific commentators as a ‘clue’ to the nature of exotic matter.

One aspect of the great scientists which most fascinates the public is that their brilliance of foresight sometimes appears to give them a near-prophetic sense of predictive vision. Think of Alfred Wegener, proposing the notion of continental drift decades before the discovery proper of tectonics and seafloor spreading. Think of William Hyde Wollaston and Joseph von Fraunhofer making independent surveys of the elemental make-up of the sun, two years shy of a century before spaceflight. Think of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves — predicted in 1916 as part of his theory of general relativity, proven by observation only in 2016.

The past week has seen another venerable theory, first realised through experimental method in 1995, finally be vindicated at length. Exotic matter, first theorised collaboratively by Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose in the early 1920s as a fifth state of matter (to go alongside solids, liquids, gas and plasma), was created in the Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the ISS. In this environment, atoms are slowed with laser light (a process known as ‘laser cooling’) and their temperature…