This isthe kind of newsthat makes me want to jump up and do ahappy dance.
These scientistsmayhave produced an entirely new phase of matter.
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Time crystals are a new phase of matter.
For the sake of simplicity, lets imagine a cube of ice.
Eventually youll just have a glass of room-temperature water.
We call this process thermal equilibrium.
An important side-effect of this law of physics is that it means a perpetual motion machine is classically impossible.
According to classical physics, the universe is alwaysmoving towards entropy.
Except when it comes to time crystals.
Time crystals dont give a damn what Newton or anyone else thinks.
Theyre lawbreakers and heart takers.
They can, theoretically, maintain entropy even when theyre used in a process.
Whats that mean
Think about a crystal youre familiar with, such as a snowflake.
Its a seven-pointed lattice one moment and a ten-pointed lattice the next, or whatever.
Time crystals can survive energy processes without falling victim to entropy.
The reason theyre called time crystals is because they can have their cake and eat it too.
Most importantly, they can do this inside of an isolated system.
Who cares?
Whats this going to mean for me?
Literally everyone should care.
As I wrote back in 2018,time crystals could be the miracle quantum computing needs.
Quantum computers can solve really hard problems.
Unfortunately, theyre brittle.
This is because of something called decoherence, which works a lot like entropy.
That sort of makes any direct measurements of qubit states (reading the computers output) difficult.
But time crystalswantto be coherent.
No, no, no, no no.
Dont get me wrong.
This is baby steps.
This is infancy research.
What Googles done, potentially, is prove that humans can manufacture time crystals.
Then why is this so exciting?
Time crystals have always been theoretical.
And by always, I mean: since 2012 when they were first hypothesized.
At the far-fetched, super-optimistic end of things we could see the creation ofa working warp drivein our lifetimes.
This could be the big eureka weve all been waiting for.
I cant wait to see what happens in peer-review.
If you want to know more, you’re free to readGoogles paper here.
The company publisheda simple explainerin November 2021 here.
