Thursday, September 16, 2021

Article: Time Crystal

Otherworldly 'time crystal' made inside Google quantum computer could change physics forever

The crystal is able to forever cycle between states without losing energy.

 https://www.livescience.com/google-invents-time-crystal

In this sense, a time crystal is like a pendulum that never stops swinging.

"Even if you totally physically isolate a pendulum from the universe, so there's no friction and no air resistance, it will eventually stop. And that's because of the second law of thermodynamics," Achilleas Lazarides, a physicist at the University of Loughborough in the U.K. who was among the scientists to first discover the theoretical possibility of the new phase in 2015, told Live Science. "Energy starts out concentrated in the pendulum's center of mass, but there's all of these internal degrees of freedom — like the ways the atoms can vibrate inside the rod — that it will eventually be transferred into."

In fact, there's no way for a large-scale object to behave like a time crystal without sounding absurd, because the only rules that enable time crystals to exist are the spooky and surreal rules that govern the world of the very small — quantum mechanics