A few thoughts on the new toy theoreticians just received...
This one is probably lost already: it's Penrose because named after a person. It's einstein because ein stein, not Einstein. Even odds that the original namers didn't even notice the pun until 2 or three others read the paper. Some of us aren't allowed to name our discoveries without adult supervision...
The Penrose tilings require multiple shapes. The ein stein requires only 1. This is where the magic lives. It's also going to be the "huh? But what about..." moment for a lot of the innocent.
Local repeats here are not periodicities; rather, they are similar to tossing multiple heads in a row with a fair coin. This is an area where visual intuition clashes with an algebra.
So how is this useful? Oh my word. Give us all time, every theorist has a bag full of toy models and questions to sort through at the moment, checking fit. In my old world, glasses liquids gasses and plasmas should all be getting checked over like a teenager with a hand me down car and a bucket full of paint.
