Quote from: SpikeYa. But just finding that if you make a synthetic something that does some stuff nothing else does doesn't make it magical proof of anything.

Correct.  A single example is not sufficient to prove something (other than "This is possible.")  However, a single example can disprove something.

Anyone who had a theory that predicted (for example) that any material would lose its magnetic properties below 26K can now take that theory, throw it in the trash can, and start again.

Does this prove that a theory (theirs, for instance) that explains both the mass of experimental data to date and the new stuff is true?  No.  Scientific theories don't get proven that way.  You can never prove that your theory is true all you can do is prove that it predicts all the results you've seen so far, and make up new experiments to create new results to see whether you get what was predicted or not.

All this new evidence does is take a whole bunch of previous theories which used to explain all the known evidence and say "Nope.  That theory no longer explains everything we've seen.  Start over."

That destructive process is actually pretty important in science.

This just occured to me. What we're dealing with is not a new state of matter, but that from which matter and energy arise. That is, all the sub-atomic particles and quarks are emergent properties of string-net liquid. This makes S-NL theory a competitor to String Theory, unless they're actually complementary.

Who was it who said that there was nothing new to discover in physics?