When you squeeze something, it gets smaller. Unless you’re
at Argonne National Laboratory.
At the suburban Chicago laboratory, a group of scientists
has seemingly defied the laws of physics and found a way to apply pressure to
make a material expand instead of compress/contract.
“It’s like squeezing a stone and forming a giant sponge,”
said Karena Chapman, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy laboratory.
“Materials are supposed to become denser and more compact under pressure. We
are seeing the exact opposite. The pressure-treated material has half the
density of the original state. This is counterintuitive to the laws of
physics.”