Scientist Investigate A Brand New Form of Matter: Time Crystals (sciencealert.com)

The discovery of "non-equilibrium matter" could re-write the rules of physics. Long-time Slashdot reader jasonbrown quotes ScienceAlert: For months now, there's been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals — strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in perpetual motion without energy. Now it's official — researchers have just reported in detail how to make and measure these bizarre crystals. And two independent teams of scientists claim they've actually created time crystals in the lab based off this blueprint, confirming the existence of an entirely new form of matter.
Both teams -- one at Harvard and the other at the University of Maryland -- have submitted their findings to peer-reviewed publications, according to the article, and "the fact that two separate teams have used the same blueprint to make time crystals out of vastly different systems is promising."

Comments

Re:Sounds like bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Smarter people than you say otherwise:

Time crystals may sound dangerously close to a perpetual motion machine, but it is worth emphasizing one key difference: while time crystals would indeed move periodically in an eternal loop, rotation occurs in the ground state, with no work being carried out nor any usable energy being extracted from the system. Finding time crystals would not amount to a violation of well-established principles of thermodynamics.

Can not get energy out

[gurps_npc]

Perpetual motion machines are allowed by the laws of physics. The galaxy is one for example, it perpetually rotates effectively forever, and by definition beyond what we can measure.

What IS impossible, is to remove energy from the system. If you do that, any machine stops, eventually, unless you add it back in somehow.

Re:Sounds like bullshit

[ClickOnThis]

Smarter people than you say otherwise:

Time crystals may sound dangerously close to a perpetual motion machine, but it is worth emphasizing one key difference: while time crystals would indeed move periodically in an eternal loop, rotation occurs in the ground state, with no work being carried out nor any usable energy being extracted from the system. Finding time crystals would not amount to a violation of well-established principles of thermodynamics.

This. Mod parent up.

Quantum-mechanical systems in their ground state cannot radiate energy, because they are already in their lowest possible energy-state.

Re:Sounds like bullshit

[mikael]

What if something were so tightly packed that it started absorbing neutrinos and other particles that would normally travel straight through regular matter?

Helium-4 seems to do something strange when cooled to a super-liquid - it's just not possible to cool down into a solid because the kinetic energy exceeds the electron bond strengths.

https://phys.org/news/2009-05-...