Episode 5

The podcast "Strange Bites" delves into two tales involving invisible demons. The first story revolves around David Pines and his discovery of a theoretical entity called "demon" in metal, which is finally observed by Elena Voss in 2023. This "demon" is a matchmaker for electrons and light bands, explaining various phenomena in materials. The second tale narrates the legend of the Lone Pine Mountain Devil, a cryptid from California, blending supernatural elements with scientific intrigue. Both stories highlight the hidden mysteries waiting to be uncovered. Welcome to Strange Bites, the podcast where we stir up the weirdest, wildest, and most mind-bending new discoveries and serve them up in a piping hot 15 minutes or less. We take all the facts and wrap them up in a creative story full of fun and weirdness. Today we're jumping into a special double episode, two tales of invisible demons. One true yet haunting tale where the science feels like uncovering something that was never meant to be seen, and another a mythical cryptid that stalks the Alabama hills of California. Now grab your flashlight and follow me into the dark mist of this double doozy. This is episode 5, part 1, the whisper that waited 67 years. It was 1956 in a small dimly lit office at the University of Illinois, rain tapped at the window like impatient fingers. David Pines sat alone, surrounded by yellow lego pads covered in symbols that seemed to shift when he looked away. He already knows about the loud ones, the plasmons, great roaring waves of electrons all charging together through metal, bright enough for light to see, heavy with electrical charge, like a storm you can hear coming. But tonight the numbers are whispering something else. What if a metal has two different families of electrons, fast ones and slow ones, light bands and heavy bands? What if they started moving against each other? One current surging forward while the other one pulls backward in perfect opposition. The charges cancel, the total electric field dies to nothing, no mass, no weight, the waves that remain would be silent, gapless. It would glide through the crystals like breath through fog, acoustic, linear, starting from zero energy and rising only as it moves. Photons would pass right through it. Ordinary instruments would never know it was there. Pines leaned back, the chill ran down his spine that had nothing to do with the weather. He wrote a name in the margin, half-joke, half-dare. Demon, short for distinct electron motion. A playful wink at Maxwell's old thermodynamic imp that would sort hot from cold without breaking the rules. Maxwell lived too early, he muttered, to have something named after him. Pines published his paper, and then, nothing. The demon slips back into the shadows of theory and waits 67 years. February, 2023, 3.17 a.m. The Materials Research Laboratory in Urbana-Champaign is a tomb of humming machines and sleeping grad students. Only one window still glows blue. Dr. Elena Voss, a post-doc who grew up chasing legends through the jagged rocks of the Alabama hills outside Lone Pine Mountain, California, is alone at the machine. She has spent months feeding perfect crystals of strontium ruthenate into the Momentum Resolve electron energy loss spectrometer. A beam of electrons fired like silver bullets at the black-layered perovskite crystal, a material that dreams of superconductivity with ruthenium-d orbitals forming exactly the kind of multiple-electron families Pines once imagined. The beta band, the gamma band, a candidate for a strange P-wave pairing that would break time itself. The ordinary plasmon showed up right on schedule, loud, charged, 1 to 1.6 electron volts, glowing like a lighthouse in the data, but something else moved underneath. Elena leans closer, a faint trace, almost nothing, a line so thin it looks like a hairline crack in reality. The energy started at zero and climbed in a perfectly straight line with momentum, gapless, acoustic. At room temperature it traveled at a third of the speed of sound inside the crystal. When she cooled the sample to 30 Kelvin, the speed drops exactly 31 percent, slowed by its secret dance with the particle hole continuum. What about the intensity? It fades with the momentum in a way that screams neutrality, no net charge, electrically invisible. A 3D acoustic plasmon born from the beta and gamma bands oscillating perfectly out of phase, one pushing while the other pulls, cancelling everything except the motion itself. Elena's breath catches. She feels it, not just data, presence, something ancient that has been writhing inside every multiband metal on earth, waiting for eyes sharp enough to notice the silence between the screams. She whispers the name in the dark. David. The machine keeps humming as if answering. She spends months ruling out every other explanation. Phonons, surface effects, wishful thinking, the data refuses to lie. In August 2023 the paper lands in nature like a quiet thunderclap. Heinz's demon is real, observed, at last. But Elena knows a deeper secret. This isn't just a new quasi-particle. It's a matchmaker that can pair electrons and light bands without ever touching the heavy ones. Orbital selective superconductivity. The missing whisper that might explain why some hydrides suddenly superconduct at temperatures we once thought impossible. Why strange metals refuse to behave, why phase transitions happen in mixed valence compounds, and why sounderons might echo through wild semi-metals. It lives in every multiband metal, pervasive, patient, invisible until the right conditions align. The demon never needed to be created. It was always there, hiding in plain sight, just like the other one, back home. In the California pines. I hope you enjoyed part one of this double demon episode. While I was doing the research for Heinz's demon, I stumbled across another pine demon, a cryptid that has been stalking the Alabama hills of California for hundreds of years. So I decided to tell both stories and blend them together in a double episode. So grab your EMF meter and infrared goggles and let's take a hike into the hills with episode five, part two, the Lone Pine Mountain Devil, aka the Pine Demon. Elena Voss never forgot the Alabama hills, those jagged rocks outside Lone Pine, California, that looked like the backbone of some sleeping giant under the shadow of Mount Whitney. She hiked there a lot as a kid, listening to her grandpa's stories about the Lone Pine Mountain Devil. The old tales said it started in the 1800s. Prospectors and settlers would disappear. When searchers found the bodies, the faces were gone, eaten clean off, torsos hollowed out to the bone, cartilage and soft bits missing. The rest left to rot in the desert sun. While the story came from 1878, a group of about 38 Spanish settlers and miners kept near the old Lone Pine tree that gave the town its name. They were heading into the Saharas for gold, but that night something came out of the twisted pines and rocky spires. A young priest traveling with them hid in his hiding tent. He peeked through a tear in the canvas and saw them, wing shapes dropping from the darkness, not birds, not bats, four to six feet tall, feathered like ancient raptors with extra wings, razor claws and long necks. They moved in a pack, shrieking high-pitched sounds that made your teeth hurt. They swarmed the camp, tearing into men, women and children. The priest swore they left only the hard parts, bones and nothing else. He survived, half mad, and wrote it all down before vanishing himself a few years later. Locals still whisper the story around campfires. Hikers today post blurry sightings on forums, shadows with glowing red eyes, packs circling at dusk. No good photos, no proof, just eaten carcasses and that feeling that you're being watched. Elena never believed it, but she thought about it and remembered the stories her father told as she drove back to Lone Pine for a break. She parked near the old movie rocks in the Alabama hills and stepped into the cold desert dark. The discovery of pines' demons still buzzed in her head. That invisible wave hiding inside metal, moving electrons out of phase, changing everything without being seen. She laughed to herself. Two demons in one year? One in a lab, one in the hills, both invisible until you know how to look. The wind picked up. Joshua trees rattled like bones. Then she heard it. Not a shriek, but a low hum, almost a low hearing, linear, steady, like a wave propagating through the night air. She froze. Out among the boulders, something shifted. Not wings, not feathers, just a ripple in the starlight as if emptiness itself had decided to move. For a split second, she saw outlines, not solid, but the absence of solid, like negative space with claws. It circled her car once, perfectly out of phase with the wind, cancelling any sound that would give them away, neutral, silent, watching. Elena didn't run. She whispered the same thing she'd whispered in the lab. I know you're there. The ripple paused. It melted back into the rocks. The hum faded. She sat on the hood of her car until dawn, heart pounding, thinking about electrons and ancient predators. Maybe the mountain demon wasn't a creature at all. Maybe it was something older. A collective wave of fear and hunger that only appears when conditions are just right. Multiband, out of phase, invisible until it strikes. Or maybe the quantum demon in the metal and the mountain demon in the pines are cousins, both hidden in plain sight, both waiting for someone sharp enough to notice the pattern. The next week, Elena started a new experiment. This time, she wasn't just looking for demons and crystals. She was listening for them in the wind. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed these demonic tales and learned a little something new. For a deeper dive, you can check out the links in the show notes. And if you enjoyed the stories, drop me a comment or leave a review and let me know what you think. Until next time, stay strange and question everything.