Anthony Raykh, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, walked the hallways of his department, knocking on professors’ doors. In his hands was a simple vial containing a mixture of water, oil, and magnetized nickel particles. No matter how many times he shook it, the contents refused to behave as physics textbooks said they should. Instead of separating into a chaotic blend or simple droplets, the liquid consistently reformed into the elegant, curvaceous shape of a classical Greek urn.
Raykh had accidentally created a shape-recovering liquid, a new state of matter that defies some long-held expectations derived from the laws of thermodynamics, the fundamental rules governing energy, entropy, and how substances interact.
The findings, published in the journal Nature Physics, detail a phenomenon that has never been observed before in the study of soft matter physics.
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