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Science

Back To the Future: the Original Time Crystal Makes a Comeback (sciencemag.org) 40

sciencehabit writes: Like vinyl records, the strange concept of a time crystal is spinning back into fashion. In 2012, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist proposed that the properties of a system of quantum particles might cycle in time much as a crystal's pattern of atoms repeats in space, even without the addition of energy, making it a bit like perpetual motion machine. But others soon proved a "no-go theorem" that said such a thing was impossible -- and replaced it with a less fantastical definition of a time crystal that researchers soon demonstrated in the lab. But now, two physicists have shown that the original notion of a time crystal is possible after all -- at least in theory. "I think it's right," says Frank Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who dreamed up time crystals but who was not involved with the new work. The new scheme is "one way of getting around the 'no-go.'" But realizing the system experimentally may be exceedingly difficult, other physicists say. In physics, patterns can arise seemingly out of nowhere. For example, in a crystalline solid, the forces between atoms do not explicitly specify the position of the atoms or the distances between them. Cool the atoms into their ground state, however, and they nestle into a repeating pattern like the squares on a checkerboard.
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Back To the Future: the Original Time Crystal Makes a Comeback

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  • We normally call the 4th dimension time. Even when I was taking linear algebra and matrix theory when Graphing 4D functions the math application created an animation where you can forward and go backwards periods of time. But if there a property of movement in more than 3 dimensions chances are it isn't really going back in time but in a dimension within our time just outside our ability to observe.

    • by sycodon ( 149926 )

      Can some physicist wasting their grant money reading Slashdot speak to the possible extrapolated/practical aspects of this?

      Or is it more of just a curiosity?

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        Why would you be asking for the practical aspects? Would you have questioned Einstein about the practical aspects of relativity theory? Or any of the founders of quantum mechanics? How about the Enlightenment? That was boondoggle too, right?

        • by sycodon ( 149926 )

          I was just fucking curious you ass sucking retard.

          God Damn, Go fuck yourself.

        • Relativity theory was very practical. Newton's laws were being used, but they were contradicted by Maxwell's Equations. Once they realized that Maxwell was correct, everybody knew they were unable to make accurate measurements because their physics model was wrong and didn't account for "something." Einstein found that "something."

          Same with quantum mechanics. The theory was needed to explain the operation of existing experimental apparatus, so anybody working with one of those experiments would have been ab

          • by RobiOne ( 226066 )

            There were many errors made and a critical one is how we measure magnetic fields.

            This error propagated via Newton and celestial motion, making the assumption that energy is related to mass. It isn't.

            This was then further propagated by Einstein and we still see energy equated to mass in his E=mc^2. While this is an interesting approximation, it is skewed from actual. Not his best work or why he received the Nobel, just accepted, because he did.

            How long are we willing to be wrong?

            Let's revisit the earliest as

      • The practical aspect would be engineering new types of solid-state oscillators. It could, for example, reduce the need to run as many clock lines around a circuit.

        It could also imply new types of integrated circuits, maybe transistors with new types of gates that act like op amps.

    • > But if there a property of movement in more than 3 dimensions chances are it isn't really going back in time but in a dimension within our time just outside our ability to observe.

      Actually, no. Movement through time happens all the time - at present you're moving through time at almost exactly 1 second per second. Only almost exactly, because you're also moving through space, and Relativity has established that all objects in the universe are moving at a constant Lorentz corrected speed - the faster

  • That "Primer" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com] was based on a true story?

  • Was one of those scientists Rick Sanchez [wikipedia.org]?

    Testicle Monster A: Yeah, well I don't know where you expect me to think you got that time crystal over there, but the only way you dumb ass, assin' ass asses could ever have one, is if it was stolen.

    Summer: You stole a time freezing crystal from testicle monsters?

    Rick: I would have been happy to pay for it, Summer, but they don't exactly sell them at Costco.

    [ From: A Rickle in Time [wikipedia.org] ]

  • This only fuels that most critical confusion at the core of all perpetuum mobile ideas!

    Because in nature, there is no reason a process can't run forever. If it is 100% efficient aka lossless. Which e.g. an electron has no problem with, in its wavefunction around an atom. It won't "slow down" magically. And in planets, it's nearly the same. Because from nature's standpoint, that is really a static state. Like the potential energy of a jar on top of your shelf.

    But: The common fallacy of the perpetuum mobile,

    • Planets in orbit are not energy lossless

      • Gravity is a conservative force, the actual path the planet takes doesn't affect the amount of force required. Orbiting does not do any work.

        • Energy is however radiated away as gravity waves. Not much of it (unless you're taking about black hole mergers or near-contact binary stars), but given enough time all orbits will eventually decay as the orbital energy is radiated away. I have no idea what the timescales would be though - it might be that in practice proton decay would destroy everything first.

          • False, gravity "waves" are not radiated. You can use the same math, but there is no known thing that is being radiated.

            Sound is similar to a gravity wave; it is effect an created by a context, and it creates wave patterns, but it is not actually an independent thing.

            As far as is known, gravity simply "is" and it doesn't have a carrier that could be radiated.

            And gravity is a conservative force, that is not up for argument. There is no such thing as "orbital energy," there are simply external forces other tha

            • You are right that Newtonian gravity is a conservative force, which is why there's a characteristic orbital energy = gravitational potential energy + kinetic energy. Energy can move back and forth between the two, as when a comet alternates between idling far from the sun, moving slowly with high gravitational potential, and zooming close past the sun at very high speed but very low gravitational potential. The total energy remains constant. See more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

              The catch is, Newton

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      I suppose that would make sense if we really knew precisely what an electron actually was. However, we don't. We can describe something we call an electron, but nailing it down as an actual particle, no. The best we can get is localized wave packet.

      • I suppose that would make sense if we really knew precisely what an electron actually was. However, we don't. We can describe something we call an electron, but nailing it down as an actual particle, no. The best we can get is localized wave packet.

        I think it's magic.

    • In this case the gotcha is that energy must be used to observe the time crystal
      • That's not really a "gotcha" in the normal sense, I mean, it is the opposite of a gotcha.

        That you can wait until you want an observation to use any energy, and still have it be in-phase with the last measurement, that's the main reason this is interesting from an engineering perspective. Normally with an oscillator you have to continuously expend energy to do work, and it is the object on which the work is done that has to oscillate. If it would just oscillate internally without doing any work, that saves a

    • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      An electron around an atom doesn't actually move. It only seems like it moves because we're bombarding it with energy in order to "watch" it. Stop pumping energy into the system, and it only exists as a wave function. Only systems in a quantum state can be "perpetual", because a quantum system by definition is not interacting. As soon as quantum system interacts, its wave function collapses. If an electron was actually moving, it would emit an infinite amount of energy as it would be in constant acceleratio
  • to the grand unified theory of Time Cube [wikipedia.org].
    • I didn't realize how woke he was until I got to the part about the Clintons and then I realized; this guy probably dug up Elizabeth Dole's pizza oven, and knows all the secrets.

  • by Kyr Arvin ( 5570596 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @03:15PM (#59463652)

    Forget time crystals, what about the Time Cube? Did you know that time is cubic, resulting in the Earth passing through four simultaneous days within a 24-hour span? You were probably the educated stupid, taught by evil educators who deny you the truth of time cubism. Singularity is a damnable lie, educators altered your mind, You cannot think opposite of what you were taught to think. You have a cyclop perspective and taught android mentality = lobotomized analytical ability.

    • It is all so meta, though. There is nothing "incorrect" about measuring each "day" as four simultaneous "days," it is just less useful for most people.

      It is the nature of math that anything consistently proportional in nature that you describe using numbers could be accurately described with a more complicated formula than whichever one you actually used.

      Of course, there is likely more utility in the search for less-complicated formulas.

  • Who cares about a "time crystal"? Everyone knows that time is a cube [2enp.com]!
  • Is Sgt Cortez going to appear to blast those TimeSplitters back into space?
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