Slashdot Mirror
The Quest To Crystallize Time - Previously Considered Impossible, Researchers Create Time Crystals (nature.com)
New submitter omaha393 writes: Researchers have addressed a perplexing issue in physics: the existence of time crystals. Time crystals, previously only hypothetical in nature, are structures that oscillate without any external energy supplied. The idea of time crystals set off a massive feud among physicists, arguing that such a state of matter could not exist. As leading time crystal proponent Frank Wilczek describes it: "conceptually, it is a clock that ticks forever without being wound." With the paper published in Nature Wednesday, researchers showed their method of production and the unusual nature of time crystals, which owe their oscillation properties to never achieving a state of equilibrium. From a report on Phys.org: Ordinary crystals such as diamonds, quartz or ice are made up of molecules that spontaneously arrange into orderly three-dimensional patterns. The sodium and chlorine atoms in a crystal of salt, for example, are spaced at regular intervals, forming a hexagonal lattice. In time crystals, however, atoms are arranged in patterns not only in space, but also in time. In addition to containing a pattern that repeats in space, time crystals contain a pattern that repeats over time. One way this could happen is that the atoms in the crystal move at a certain rate. Were a time crystal of ice to exist, all of the water molecules would vibrate at an identical frequency. What is more, the molecules would do this without any input from the outside world. [...] Shivaji Sondhi, a Princeton professor of physics said that the work addresses some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter. "It was thought that if a system doesn't settle down and come to equilibrium, you couldn't really say that it is in a phase. It is a big deal when you can give a definition of a phase of matter when the matter is not in equilibrium," he said.
...Physics...you crazy!
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
Hexagonal lattice in NaCl?! NaCl forms a cubic lattice!
Yes I'm a crystallographer!
How can we weaponize this, can we kill in the past or future?
Do these physicist get to collect some money from Ray?
LOL about 8 years too late there buddy!
I was expecting them to have discover Resublimated Thiotimoline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline
I read the linked article (which is a summary of the real report). It's not my field.
How is what they describe anything other than just a stable oscillator? It consumes energy, since to run it requires regular (although perhaps not periodic?) pulses of light.
How is this different from a macroscopic tuned circuit that also resists changes in driving force, and oscillates at a stable frequency? Because it's made with a handful of atoms instead of gazoober electrons streaming around a circuit? I'm (not intentionally) being snarky -- I'm curious because by the article the physicists are peeing all over themselves in excitement, so I'm guessing they think there's something to this that I don't see.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
What do you idiotic ramblings have to do with Time Crystals?
You say that now, but when Thanos uses them to complete his infinity gauntlet you'll realize their might.
...is now only 20 years away!
Wait...it was 20 years ago!
I'm confused.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
What do you idiotic ramblings have to do with Time Crystals?
Duh! He wants to go back using "Time Crystals" so he can answer his own question..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It must be true! This is a repeated article, and just like real time crystals, nothing beneficial can be derived from it!
https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/01/28/2027253/scientist-investigate-a-brand-new-form-of-matter-time-crystals
The just of the experiment is: you actively pump something with a given RF signal, and it oscillates. There is nothing new, innovative or particularly cool about this. They're entangled oscillators. It's not breaking thermodynamics, it's not breaking equilibrium and it certainly isn't anything remotely close to "perpetual motion" as required by the idea of a "time crystal" - it's a system which consumes energy to maintain an oscillation. An ball spinning in space is more energy-efficient in terms of "repeating structure over time" and it's not even "a bunch of atoms spinning the same way flying in formation in space" - it's just a freaking oscillator. Physics hasn't had major new innovations because idiots like these get all the funding.
He must be trapped in a time crystal.
Shouldn't this violate the Law of Conservation of Energy? Or is this literally the achievement of what would have normally been thought of as an asymptote to infinity, where no energy can be extracted from this closed system and it's perpetuating on merely perfect conservation of the energy that was introduced into the system when it was established?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You're just bitter because your candidate was so bad he lost to a black man named Hussein.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Holy Shit there buddy ... I believe you may have eaten too many "Time Crystals" if you get my reference.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I think it's flawed logic to assume that the lowest energy state in a universes so fluid and in motion would be absolute stillness.
Perhaps it's oscillations due to the quantum foam, or space/time itself moves, and thus a lower energy particle would vibrate at some frequency rather than not.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
If, as the summary quoted, "Time crystals,... are structures that oscillate without any external energy supplied", how did they come to be? Spontaneously? Apparently not.
So these researchers "showed their method of production ", one that requires no external energy be applied to the time crystals, or their source materials?
And this is why I am not a physicist.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
after all.
All those physicists who rejected my permanent magnet wheel idea without even the courtesy of a reply will not be feeling so smug now. :-)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-shape-and-volume-of-a-photon/answer/Piotr-S%C5%82upski
https://www.quora.com/Can-you-explain-Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman-absorber-theory-in-laymans-terms
And more.
I invented Patterns. You are all welcome.
https://www.facebook.com/piotrslupski/posts/1479124985445116 Here is the mathematics of spacetime in a very nice wallpaper. Read my quoras above.
Hillary loses to everyone so it's no surprise Obama won.
Or anywhere else in the physical universe, unless some special laws apply. If you create a form of matter that is "stuck" in time, that matter will be locked in a spot in the physical universe.
The problem we will have is that the Earth is spinning, the Earth is going around the Sun, the solar system is swirling within the Milky Way, and the Galaxy exists in a universe that is expanding. Once you remove a physical object from relativity, all hell will break loose. From our perspective, that material will rocket off into space (or burrow right through the planet).
Essentially we will have left it behind, locked in the space-time it was created in.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Thiotimoline
The major peculiarity of the chemical is its "endochronicity": when it is mixed with water, it starts dissolving before it makes contact with water. Two of the carbon's four chemical bonds lie in normal space and time, one of the bonds projects into the future and another into the past.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Everyone knows that you don't eat time crystals. You break them down into a powder and shove them up your butt in a semi-permeable bag.
Whatever they thing they have created, according to interpretation of their instruments, which uses statistics and probability, is not time. Time is a derived characteristic of an observed process and does not exist as an independent phenomena. Whatever they have convinced themselves it is, it is not time.
I invented patterns
https://www.quora.com/Is-a-black-hole-just-empty-space-where-the-quantum-foam-has-been-sucked-in-by-the-same-mechanism-as-Hawking-radiation/answer/Piotr-S%C5%82upski
https://www.quora.com/Can-you-explain-Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman-absorber-theory-in-laymans-terms
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-shape-and-volume-of-a-photon/answer/Piotr-S%C5%82upski
...with Time Crystals. Let's see if he notices.
How very cold you are.
Isn't dilithium ordinary quartz but with a four-dimentional crystalline structure ?
I've been able to buy these at my local new age healing center for decades. Nothing to see here.
Well obviously, it was by travelling back in time that Obama instigated the Great Recession before he took office.
And by travelling forward in time, he set up the Trump wiretaps.
Considering some of the conspiracy theories swirling around these days, that almost makes sense.
Screw politics anyhow!
Don't let the m0n1k3r obfuscate my true nature! ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This is nothing new. Thiotimoline was discovered in 1948. It has the property of "endochronicity": when it is mixed with water, it starts dissolving before it makes contact with water. This is because one of its carbon bonds projects slightly into the future, while another projects slightly into the past. There have been several papers on this substance published in the Journal of the American Chronochemical Society.
Way to take a bit of humor and turn it into a shitty political rant.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"Time crystals, previously only hypothetical in nature, are structures that oscillate without any external energy supplied."
That would seem to violate some pesky law of physics, but what do I know.
If true, it has some staggering implications. Perhaps in 100 years their use will be so commonplace that they'll be regarded the same way electricity is today- as a basic part of the universe that is taken for granted.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You're learning to use "obfuscate"!
The Quest To Crystallize Time - Previously Considered Impossible... ...a massive feud among physicists...
The combination of this kind of nonsense with big, glossy pictures does a huge disservice to science. On the one hand, it puts those of us who actually have even a basic knowledge about physics, off our lunch, because it is so, I don't know, either disingenious or perhaps written by idiots who don't understand what they are talking about. And on the other hand, it gives the more naive readers the impression that science is something remote and inaccessible; something that is out of this world and certainly out of ordinary people's league; IOW it discourages those who are interested, but not yet experienced enough from believing they could ever be clever enough to do science. I think it is shameful.
Instead of reading this kind of crap, we should encourage people to take part in things like citizen science; real science and research are things that ordinary people can do, and have done in the past, producing important, real results.
I can have a Sonic Screwdriver and a Light Saber
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Regardless, it's pretty interesting. I don't think I'll put in my order fr the eternal clock oscillator just yet though.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No, it will get modded down because it's both off topic and an obvious troll.
Why call them something that sounds like it came out of a bad Doctor Who slash?
Sounds like 'isentropic oscillators' would work better.
If I understood correctly, this time crystal does not oscillate on its own, the researcher have to feed it with laser bursts.
Did time crystals just make entropy irrelevant?
They are just going through a phase and need some more time to settle down.
Consider those clocks that are powered just off air pressure fluctuations. The keep a regular Rhythm. The energy inputs are random not synchronized. But they gather energy from the fluctuations. You could say it's a maxwell's demon using a ratchet to capture the energy. And while such a ratchet can't work in equilibrium (see Feynman Lectures), it can work just fine when not in equilibrium.
Thus there doesn't seem to be anything remarkable here.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's a "time crystal" in the sense that the quantum states of the structure exhibit a precisely recurring pattern in time.
So it is a crystal where the oscillations are synchronized, or at least that's how most physicists would describe it if they were not trying to hype it up and make it sound cool. Perhaps we could try this with 1st year physics: by the same logic we can describe waves on a string as "time waves" because each point on the string moves over time and is synchronized to each other point via a constant phase difference.
You're just bitter because your candidate was so bad he lost to a black man named Hussein.
No he's not. He doesn't believe a word of it -- it's classic trolling, where a troll is just throwing out something he knows is nonsense for the sake of a reaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
I don't remember the specifics of Thiotimoline, but I think if it existed with the properties that Asimov invented, (and you were the only one who knew), you could make a ton of money on the stock market. If you set up a system to dump TTL into the solvent when a market trigger was hit, you could measure prices in the future and act on them in the present.
From TFA:
"... it would not be in its lowest energy state, and it would require a regular kick to pulse."
and
"The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential: a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact with each other and an element of random disorder."
So, no perpetual motion machine. However, maybe if they used a nice hot cup of tea to generate brownian motion as the source of random disorder, perhaps this could be a step towards inventing an infinite improbability drive?