Slashdot Mirror
Physicists Attempting To Test 'Time Crystals'
ceview writes "This story at Wired seems to have lots of people a bit confused: 'In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of "time crystals" — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. ... [A] Berkeley-led team will attempt to build a time crystal by injecting 100 calcium ions into a small chamber surrounded by electrodes. The electric field generated by the electrodes will corral the ions in a "trap" 100 microns wide, or roughly the width of a human hair. The scientists must precisely calibrate the electrodes to smooth out the field. Because like charges repel, the ions will space themselves evenly around the outer edge of the trap, forming a crystalline ring.' The experimental set up is incredibly delicate (Bose Einstein Condensate), so it implies this perpetual motion effect can't really be used to extract energy. What is your take on it? It's unlike to upend anything, as the article suggests, because at a quantum level things behave weirdly at the best of times. The heavy details are available at the arXiv."
How the heck is it that Satyendar Nath Bose didn't get a Nobel prize?
I guess back then they didn't know how awesome his ideas were?
Can we get something more definite than that? I mean if the submitter doesn't know, and it sounds like he doesn't, why even say anything.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
From the article: "How can something move, and keep moving forever, without expending energy? It seemed an absurd idea — a major break from the accepted laws of physics. "
Isn't that what Newton's first law of motion says? Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. Clearly the article isn't explaining this properly.
I didn't know that anyone had a problem with perpetual motion on frictionless surfaces. After all... isn't that how galaxies keep spinning forever? If there's no friction then there's no entropy and of course you can keep doing it.
Am I missing something here?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
What is your take on it?
Yes, Any other Nobel Prize-winning physicists / Slashdoters with Bose Einstein Condensate experience please chime in. ... /sarcasm
But first, let me get some pop corn
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'll admit I'm not the brightest of people (public school education), but I can't figure exactly what this has to do with time. Any chance of you higher educated science folks want to explain this a bit better?
Be seeing you...
It always saddens me when scientists are afraid of looking like fools. Fortunately this one over came his fear.
OMG the auditors are back at it. Somebody find Susan.
The full paper is available on the researcher's website: http://timecube.com/
All these times we've been complaining how the "editors" were trolling with their crap story selection. And now, for once an editor selects an interesting and relevant story, and all the comments are at the level of 4chan crap.
Slashdot really has fell off the cliff.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
In all chemical bonds the ground state has non-zero energy which results in a vibration of the two atoms. They will vibrate backwards and forwards forever as there is no lower quantum state to lose energy to. This doesn't really seem all that different, other than they're making a rotating non-zero ground state.
Wasn't all of this in "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" by Asimov?
At the quantum level, a "ring around the rosie" dance of atoms (really just nodes of a complex wave function) in a BEC is a freebie, however delicately balanced. Provided the containment isn't perturbed, there's no input energy required to keep things "moving". However, any attempt to extract energy from the setup will cause it to collapse. Even extracting information, such as the spin of the BEC will have to provide all of the energy in the probe.
the term perpetual motion is used in different ways. usually to imply that something is a magical source of endless motion.
There are actually plenty of physical systems that will move for ever. anything that moves with no friction. bodies in space is almost an example of this, but would actually be a small friction from interstellar (and intergalactic) gas and dust, and interaction with CMBR. also there are plenty of quantum 'motions' that could qualify. you can't extract energy from these systems without slowing them. in the quantum case they might still 'move' in the ground state, so you can't extract that energy.
Then there are the crazy mechanical designs that people invent. generally (ignoring the flat out fraudsters) the inventor believes that they have found a system that generates a perpetual force that for example rotates a wheel. They usually believe that they just need to get the friction a bit lower, and then it will run. This is a good example http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm#stevinprob (in fact everone should go and read that whole site.)
How exactly do they plan to first resurrect both Jim Henson and Madeline L'Engle?
Wasn't all of this in "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" by Asimov?
heh...glad I'm not the only one who made that connection. That was a specific carbon compound, IIRC, that dissolved 1.12 seconds before water hit it, and Asimov's clever scientists and engineers figured out how to power a stardrive with it. Wonder what would happen if engineers figured out how to move energy into this time cube and then extract it later on. Might be a shipstone in the making... :) (I like Asimov a lot, but Heinlein is a better story teller.)
He also found that the crystals were cubes.
This sounds like a kinetic analog.
Isaac Asimov was right, Keanu Reeves is the chosen one!
We've replaced the regular coffee in the Turboencabulator on this Feraliminal Lycanthropizer with time crystals. Let's see if we can't raise up something we can't put down...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Can we get something more definite than that? I mean if the submitter doesn't know, and it sounds like he doesn't, why even say anything.
it means they can finally build a lattice for the TimeCube. http://www.timecube.com/
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Magnets of every form are not a free form of energy. This is a trick using magnets. Maybe something very efficient will come out of it. Maybe it's just cool. Maybe it will lead to other things. What it won't lead to is a reversal of the laws of thermodynamics.
So, it is sort of like the Windows 7 busy cursor. Goes round and round forever.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
Have no idea if it will work or not, but it sounds hella cool.
- I stole your sig.
We can look at the states before and after a quantum transition, but we cannot try and catch an energetic hydrogen atom that is half-way through emitting a photon. Well, we don't actually know that but a lot of people have tried because not being able to take some process apart really irritates physicists like nothing else, and in the last hundred years, quantum physics has not been cracked open at all. We can tell whether an electron is in a particular orbital, or whether a nucleus can spontaneously decay, but we cannot predict exactly how long it is going to stay in any state other than the ground state, because the ground state has no energy to go anywhere.
We cannot tell when a quantum state is going to change but can another quantum state see something we can't, even if it cannot communicate it? Can you get processes which ping back and forth, or go in circles in a regular fashion; or when a quantum state is reached, is all information lost, and the particle may have been in that state for a quadrillionth of a second or a billion years. My guess, and it is a pure guess with no information behind it, is that the information is lost, and you cannot get these cyclic quantum events. We shall see. Or not.
Not sure about the piezoelectric bit, though.
No one ever said that a perpetual motion machine would be useful. And a quantum-level perpetual motion machine is barely even interesting unless it is providing free energy, even if only at the quantum level.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.