The 2014 “it does not exist” clapback paper

23:34um Lonsdaleite is faulted and twinned cubic diamond and does not exist >> Mhm. >> as a discrete material. What a banger of a title. >> Mhm. >> Okay? It's just like, no, this is fake. >> F- For those who might not understand, this is like def- the definition of a clapback. >> Yes. Yeah. No, like to put in the title, does not exist as a discrete material, when for like the past 40, 50 years, people >> have been like talking about how this is a thing. >> Yes. >> Right? And so, here is the argument that he's making. He's saying that Lonsdaleite is just cubic diamond, but with something called stacking faults. What he's saying is, if you look at the meteorite samples, okay?

24:15>> There's a bunch of cubic diamond lattice structure, but that cubic diamond lattice structure is not contiguous. There's like cubic diamond here, and then there's another domain of cubic diamond on over here, and the boundary between them is slightly offset. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So, when I put this through X-ray diffraction, I am going to get artifacts that suggest that there are spots where there is hexagonal diamond. And he goes through and does transmission electron microscopy of the sample of that meteorite, the Canyon Diablo meteorite, and he's showing that there are these stacking faults, there are these boundaries right? >> Yep. >> And so, if you have enough stacking faults in your cubic diamond, the diffraction pattern is going to resemble

24:56the hexagonal stuff. And so you're not actually making hexagonal diamond, you're just making a bunch of cubic diamond with defects. And then when you put it through the x-ray diffraction, oh, it's hexagonal. You can't say that. >> So he called it fugazi. >> Yeah, he's like he's like, "No, this is this is nothing." Right? But meanwhile, computational studies are refusing to give up. And this is what I was talking about, right? Like you go you go through and you and you and you put it in the computer and the computer's saying this is fine. >> Right. >> This is totally a possible allotrope of carbon. >> Yep. >> This works. The carbon atoms are all happy. They don't want to go into another phase. Like you set them up like this, they'll stay like this. >> Based on the rules of of just foundational and basic physics that we

25:37understand to be true, you can extrapolate in a computer and it it's fine. >> Yeah, it's fine. Totally works. So so what what gives? >> Which means the theory of the case here is that it is an engineering problem, not a fundamental physics or science problem. >> That's kind of the what's been the argument. the argument and but in order to prove that you got to just solve the engineering problem. Yeah, right? And