[jonstokes]

I totally buy it that there is no such thing as an "unidentifiable alloy." I also buy it that journalists, not being materials scientists or indeed scientists of any sort, do not know the difference between an "alloy" and "a hunk of some hard material," so at some point they wrote down "alloy" because the word sounds exotic, like something you'd find at Area 51.

This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get specific terms of art wrong, and nitpickers nitpick and clarify. I know this because I made a career of such nitpicking and clarifying once.

My point here is that nothing put forward in this article means that there's not a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how. It just means that said materials are not properly "alloys" and the journos got that word wrong, as journos often do when they're way outside their area of expertise.

[reaperducer]

> a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how

A lot stranger things have been found hidden in Vegas buildings than alien artifacts. Just a few weeks ago it started raining cheerleader uniforms in downtown Las Vegas because a demolition crew pulling down a hotel hit a sealed-off room filled with thousands of them.

[DonHopkins]

It sounds like you're joking, but you aren't!

It'd kind of beautiful, actually.

https://vitalvegas.com/excavators-hit-mother-lode-wtf-las-ve...

It makes me wonder what it will look like when they tear down the building storing old Star Trek: The Experience junk. The UFO conspiracy theorists are going to have a great time with those photo.

[colanderman]

You know, I saw something like this in Boston just yesterday. They are tearing down a condemned parking garage near my office; I saw a room they had started demolishing that was packed chock-full with what looks like winter clothes. Like, they had been stuffed in it as insulation or something. Some had fallen out onto the rubble below. Very strange.

[a3n]

If they survive any significant decline of civilization, then the next civilization's archaeologists may suspect "alien astronauts."

[ImSkeptical]

I think a warehouse of alien artifacts is stranger than cheerleader uniforms.

[DanielBMarkham]

Yes, agreed. I hate to say it, but this is a crap article. The point of the original NYT article was that they had something they could not identify, not that there was some new form of matter. All this consists of is a journalist (and hopefully editor) using the wrong phraseology and SA jumping on it like an eager five-year-old on the mechnical fire engine at WalMart.

SA used to have a series, I think it was called something like the "Citizen Scientist" or maybe the "Amateur Scientist". This article is a new type of journalism I've noticed taking off in the last decade or two that I'll call the "Asshole Scientist". It consists of self-righteous and assine authors taking pot-shots (some warranted, some not) at whatever cultural item is in the current zeitgeist.

It's great for gathering clicks. Nothing like a bunch of folks sitting in their living room with a smug smile on their face, scrolling through a short journalistic snack-food, feeling like they're in with the cool kids. But it doesn't do much in the way of showing people how to have reasonable public conversations. Or even how to read charitably.

Note that I'm not upset with the content of the article, just the tone. A bit of tweaking and it'd be fine. But that would defeat the purpose. This kind of article is all about tone.

[iconvoid]

What is the distinction between "material that you can't identify" and a "whole new type of matter?"

Unless something is interfering with the efforts to identify a given substance, there aren't a whole lot of options left besides it being something "new" (which is to say hitherto unknown).

[marshray]

It's as if somebody had been quoted saying "The UFO appeared to be surrounded by some type of brightly glowing plasma" and Scientific American were to go get the opinions of plasma physicists about whether or not this was possible with plasma.

[sgt101]

It really isn't.

What the material scientists are saying is that there are techniques which would allow them to identify any physical material given that our understanding of the way that they universe works is approximately correct. If a material was discovered that was unidentifiable the government would not be putting it in a warehouse, anywhere, it would be in a massive secret lab. All the people who SA interviewed would have been co-opted into joining said lab. Undergraduate education in Physics and Chemistry in the US would be grinding to a halt, NIST grants and DARPA grants would be zero for any other topic, publication and patent rates would be falling precipitously.

Why? Because such a find would be "all bets are off" everything would be up for grabs, not only would every scientist be scrambling to be involved - all the others would be encased in dark depression knowing that what they were up to was essentially worthless.

There would be questions in the UN, threats of violence against the US, allies would be sending worried missions and publicly begging for inclusion (unless they were included in which case they would be mouth shut deferential and smug in company..)

[adrianN]

Or the government would keep it hidden somewhere where nobody believes it's the real thing to avoid trouble in the UN and threats of violence...

[xenophonf]

The Bomb was a game changer, everyone working on the Manhattan Project knew it, and they _still_ had spies successfully infiltrating the project and exfiltrating above-top-secret data. Some supposedly alien material wouldn't change human nature. Something that big would leak.

[adrianN]

It did leak. Everybody "knows" the government has been experimenting on Aliens and alien technology since at least Roswell. There are even articles in the New York Times about warehouses storing alien artifacts!

[beamatronic]

That is a good point. If you were in possession of world-changing, society-breaking, panic-inducing information, how else would you prepare society for eventually hearing the full truth?

You would do it as a laughable joke over a long period of time.

[syshum]

That is why they stopped trying to outright hide projects like that, and instead mix the truth in tsunami of disinformation, sensationalize, crack pot theories, conspiracy, and the like so even if legitimate "Top Secret" info was leaked it could be safely dismissed as conspiracy, lies, or the newest term "fake news"

[armitron]

Obviously the narrative you put down makes no sense whatsoever, game theoretic and otherwise. For a better, much more realistic understanding of how intelligence agencies may react to something like this, I suggest you read Richard Heuer's psychology of intelligence analysis [1].

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

[andrewflnr]

It's even stupider than that. The original quote was "alloys and other materials", but all the "rebuttals" are strictly about alloys in particular. They just ignored half the sentence they were nitpicking and declared the whole thing rebutted.

[sushisource]

Yeah, if you are willing to buy that they have something stored they can't identify, this is the most logical explanation.

That said, I would still buy that there are probably almost no materials that we couldn't at least get a handle on. If they were truly incomprehensible it would likely be because they were the result of manipulating properties that we don't even know exist yet (higher dimensionality, etc, whatever other sci-fi shit), and I feel like something that sensational and world changing would be incredibly hard to cover up.

[DonHopkins]

A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet.

I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better understanding of science or a better term to describe it.

An integrated circuit is a fine grained combination of several different kinds of metal and other materials, but they're meticulously arranged and sandwiched together, not just melted together into an alloy.

At what point do you draw the line between nanotechnology and alloy, when you have the technology to 3d-print each and every atom?

[krapp]

>I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better understanding of science or a better term to describe it.

There's no mention of what properties these materials are supposed to have, much less that the materials seem so exotic as to be beyond comprehension or a more accurate description. The original New York Times article merely mentions the "storage of metal alloys and other materials..."

"Alloys" may literally just mean "alloys."

[sandworm101]

Turing could see the recognizable structure and after probing it a while would quickly work out its function. He would understand all the bits and pieces and almost instantly speculate on how it was manufactured. Something alien would be more akin to showing Plato a laser pointer. Plato could spend a lifetime poking at it without learning much of anything. That's the sort of material they would need to lock up.

[fjsolwmv]

You think Alan Turing wouldn't be able to use a microscope?

[rgbrenner]

It depends on what how old Turing was... if it's 20 year old Turing -- an electron microscope wasn't invented yet... so no, he couldn't use one to see all of the structures of a CPU.. just the larger structures visible with an optical microscope (limited to ~200nm (Rayleigh criteron) but I dont know if they had the lens manufacturing good enough back then to reach that limit)... which may not be enough for him to figure it out.

Edit: And even when he died in the 1954, electron microscopes werent that advanced... we still needed to invent new techniques, improve our lens manufacturing, etc. There were a lot of shortcomings with it back then that limited its usage. So even in his later years, I wonder how much detail he could actually see on a modern CPU.

[DonHopkins]

Of course he could, but unless you told him you were a time traveler from the future, or the Germans had vastly superior secret technology they hadn't deployed yet, it would be so unlike the computers of his time that it probably wouldn't seem plausible that it was what he knew of as a computer.

[sitkack]

So many quotables in this thread. I thank experience and brown liquor.

[godelski]

Alloys, composites, raw materials, you can identify them. If they have atoms you can identify what is in them. Now there could be weird materials that are hard to more difficult to identify. But you need a more compelling argument.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[joshuaheard]

If they have a vehicle whose flight defies our knowledge of physics, maybe it's made from a material that does the same.

[totalZero]

While I agree that journalists are often wrong (sometimes intentionally and sensationally so), it's 100% fair to say that the top metallurgists among us almost certainly cannot identify every extant pure metal and alloy in the entire universe.

There are other thermal, gravitational, and energetic environments in the universe that we probably haven't even begun to understand.

We are still learning how the universe appears to work.

What kind of scientist can draw a conclusion without having conducted any sort of observation? That kind of closed-mindedness is totally damning to human understanding.

[throwanem]

The nice thing about atomic theory is that it doesn't really have that kind of hole in it. If you find, say, a sample of an island-of-stability metal you've never seen before and didn't even think was all that likely to be able to exist, you can still study and characterize it in terms of those materials we are more familiar with. You're right that we don't understand everything about the universe. But what we do understand generalizes well enough to cover the "alien alloys" case.

The alternative possibility is that there are places in the universe where fundamental physics works totally differently from here, yet materials formed there can exist here in an apparently stable state - an entire second physical system, never so much as hinted at in any of our own investigations. That would be considerably more surprising than a reporter through ignorance and haste having mischaracterized the content of a story! Reporters do that all the time.