Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real

[Nevilledog]

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Natalie Wolchover
@nattyover
New: Google's quantum computing team in collaboration with physicists say they have demonstrated a genuine time crystal for the first time. I've been chasing this story for months now; the paper finally dropped yesterday evening. Read all about it:

Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real | Quanta Magazine
Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.
quantamagazine.org
7:26 AM · Jul 30, 2021

https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-time-crystal-built-using-googles-quantum-computer-20210730/

In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal” for the first time.

A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.

“The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” said co-author Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. That’s the law that says disorder always increases.

Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break “time-translation symmetry,” the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time.

*snip*

[grumpyduck]

1. "...the second law of thermodynamics"

"That’s the law that says disorder always increases."

Hmmmm... I guess that law applies to the Republican Party too...