Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real 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.
Anyone who is qualified to get through the jargon and verify the veracity of these claims?!? Otherwise, it kinda sounds like a lot of nonsense to me, a lay person...
>The new time crystal demo marks one of the first times a quantum computer has found gainful employment. Thanks for the links . Interesting reading .
Thank you for that . I realy enjoyed reading it especialy as there were several links to look at it from different directions . Its not hard to understand ........ but it gets lost in terminology . ' Crystals ' and ' Time crystals ' ......... and how a crystal can exist in a computer Questions 1 - Is it realy happening ( as they claim and theorise ) ...... or is there a failure in their methodology , interpretation . 2 - They claim that they have system that has a resting state ....... that can be agitated so that it changes its state ........ by applying energy to it ....,..... BUT ....... they claim that the energy isnt absorbed ......... that theres no energy exchange . Thats like saying something can have an effect on somethinmg that it doesnt effect ? EDIT @ Universe .......If i f**k up , or missunderstand something please tell me
Could These Crystals Help Us Travel Through Time? This article is good too. Based on that, it's as creepy as quantum entanglement.
......... thanks ....... but ....... time travel is impossible .......... because the past and the future dont exist Will read
>“One of the issues is that we have a fairly fixed idea of what space and time is. Resolving the hardest problems in physics requires throwing away a lot of our preconceived notions.” Thats cool comming from an article thats full of stupid ' Preconcieved ' notions like multiuniverses and parralel universes . But its true . We need to look differently .
So far, not much of this "concrete stuff" that I can see... Lots of money going their way, though... Must be fun...
See, I see this: "A time crystal is, as you might expect, an arrangement of atoms or molecules that form a regular, repeated pattern in time. They'll sit in one configuration for a while, then flip to another, back and forth and back and forth." and I start laughing... A complete BS hypothesis if ever I saw one!!! But I am not a physicist, mercifully...
https://www.offgridenergyindependen...ation-to-be-efficiently-linked-in-new-project Solar Power and Desalination to be Efficiently Linked in New Project Cranfield University will join 19 research partners spread through 12 countries to develop a first-of-a-kind plant which couples concentrated solar power (CSP) and desalination techniques. The 10M€ European Union's Horizon 2020 funded research and innovation programme will last 4 years. Innovative technologies related to both CSP and desalination will be designed to improve the efficiency of existing concepts. Improvements will be made on the independent systems but also on their coupling, taking advantage from the mutual interaction and potential. Cranfield University is the only UK partner, and they are building on a long-standing reputation in CSP, the grant is worth 799k€ to them over 4 years. Chris Sansom, Cranfield's Professor of CSP and Head of Centre for Renewable Energy Systems, said: "Generating environmentally-safe and sustainable sources of both power and fresh water is a challenge for many countries. The final demonstration system will be a 2 MWel power plant built in Saudi Arabia bringing together two promising technologies associated for the first time to reach unprecedented efficiencies. For Cranfield, it is further recognition of our research capabilities in both CSP and Water Sciences." Fraunhofer Institute, Lund University, Cranfield University, Tekniker, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, University of Brescia, Technical University of Eindhoven, University of Maribor, Luleå University of Technology, King Saud University, University of Bahrain and German University of Technology) working alongside 3 industrials (Baker Hughes, Cobra and ACSP), and 3 SMEs (Protarget, Temisth and Euroquality).
Here is why: "A time crystal has periodic structures both in space and time. Particles arranged in a periodic pattern in space rotate in one direction even at the lowest energy state, determining periodicity in time." Everybody should pretend as if it's all somehow a "fact", all of it, 10000% solidly proven, in fact unquestionable and yet, it looks to me, like there are umpteen notions just shot out of a gun, tons of outrageous presumptions, nothing proven whatsoever... Again, to me, a lay person... But it would be kewl if a real pro would come along and pick this heap of presumptions critically apart.... Else, it looks like a nice little geek story for good night...
If you had read the last article i posted you would see a "pro" explain how time crystals are supposed to work. Its a fact and you can find an updated explaination here Spoiler: Article by Tim Anderson . Lately, it has been in the news that Google quantum computing researchers (and numerous university researchers) have created the first true time crystal in a quantum computer. While it sounds like something out of a Marvel movie, time crystals are a real phenomenon. The crystals flip back and forth between two states periodically in time which mimics the regularity of the spacing of molecules in a crystal. There have been a lot of misconceptions thrown about whether time crystals violate the laws of thermodynamics: conservation of energy or the tendency for entropy to increase. Some have even suggested that they achieve the dream of perpetual motion. This is false and shows an ignorance of the fine print attached to the laws of thermodynamics as well as the real requirements for achieving a time crystal. First off, time crystals are not perpetual motion machines in that (a) they cannot do mechanical work and (b) they do not exist in a ground or equilibrium state. Rather, they are quantum systems that do no work and cannot reach a ground state. Second, time crystals do not violate the law of conservation of energy. They do not gain or lose energy but move without energy loss. This is generally possible in small systems consisting of a few atoms. The law of conservation of energy arises from something called continuous time translation symmetry, which means that you can change the time any physical event happens and, all other things being equal, it will behave the same in our universe. You can change that time by any amount, no matter how small; that is where the “continuous” part comes from. Time crystals (those that have been experimentally realized and theoretically justified) do not violate continuous time translation symmetry. They violate discrete time translation symmetry. A discrete symmetry is like that of rotating a square or other regular polygon. Only a circle has a continuous rotational symmetry. The time crystal violates the discrete symmetry of the driving force — a laser for example — by have a frequency that is a fraction of the driving frequency but not necessarily a simple integer fraction. A discrete symmetry does not give rise to a conservation law, so the conservation of energy is safe. If you ever had a closed system that did violate continuous time translation symmetry, the conservation of energy would be in trouble, but you can only do this in the context of general relativity. In general relativity, it is possible to break down the meaning of time itself using wormholes and black holes and violate conservation of energy. We aren’t talking about doing that here. Time crystals that break continuous time translation symmetry have been hypothesized, but they make unphysical assumptions like infinite numbers of particles interacting at infinite distances. While these kinds of assumptions are common in classical statistical mechanics, with time crystals, the premise that you have a small number of particles and limited range interactions is critical to their construction. If you make unphysical assumptions and end up with unphysical predictions, you need to go back to the drawing board. Time crystals are a good example of a non-equilibrium process because they cannot exist in a ground state. They do not do work. But they do not run down! Quantum systems do not necessarily run down. For example, some experiments show that quantum systems can appear to run down and suddenly become excited again because the energy they supposedly “lost” rebounded back into the system and heated it up. This turns out to be a problem when making microcircuits because heat might not be carried away from a wire that is only a few atoms thick. It could leave and then reflect back. Laws like the 2nd law of thermodynamics — that all things tend to disorder — are statistical laws and tend to be violated when talking about systems of only a few atoms. Other laws like the conservation of energy, spin, and particle number actually get in the way, forcing systems to fluctuate between specific states that depend on their initial state and never reach equilibrium. As you reduce the number of degrees of freedom in any system, you can run into blockages to reaching equilibrium. Imagine, for example, if you tried to conserve energy with only a handful of atoms. You would be heavily constrained in how those atoms are allowed to move around because any motion changes the overall energy of the system both in terms of the kinetic energy of the atoms and their interaction energy from electromagnetism. As soon as you connect those atoms to the outside world however you can change the energy all you like, and so many more configurations and behavior open up. That lets the system run down or thermalize. The really interesting feature of time crystals turns out not to be breaking the laws of thermodynamics but that they violate the intuition above. When you drive a many body system with something like a laser, you expect it to heat up and become more and more disordered because energy is not conserved. You are pumping energy into the system. Time crystals do not heat up. Rather, they maintain a stable non-equilibrium state that absorbs no energy but just flips back and forth between two states. This is a beautiful example of stable non-equilibrium states emerging from spontaneous symmetry breaking — just like an ordinary crystal being formed, but in time. A similar classical example is a Kapitza pendulum. This is a pendulum where the point from which is it suspended is oscillating up and down. This vertical oscillation of the suspension point is the driving oscillation, much like the driving laser in a time crystal. One of the fascinating features of the Kapitza pendulum is that at certain high frequencies of the driving oscillation the pendulum can swing inverted. So, even though the equilibrium state of the pendulum is to be hanging down, stable non-equilibrium states exist provided a driving oscillation. And, also like a time crystal, that driving oscillation does not cause runaway energy and entropy increase in the system. It simply provides a region of stability (in the phase space) that would otherwise be unstable and prevents the system from reaching its ground state. This is called dynamic stabilization. Without the driving laser or other influence, time crystals, likewise, would not have a stable regime in which to exist. Analogies aside, time crystals — specifically a kind called a Floquet time crystal which is what the Google researchers achieved — arise from a concept that only occurs in quantum physics called Many Body Localization (MBL). Localization is something we take for granted in the classical world. We assume that if we have a bunch of checkers on a checkers board that all those checkers have a particular location and aren’t going to move from where we put them. If I put a checker down somewhere on the grid, it doesn’t somehow spread out like a gelatinous ooze, only to reappear somewhere else when observed. In the quantum world, such things happen. Particles do not have definite locations. Instead, they have wavefunctions that represent their probable locations. What wavefunctions mean or whether they are “real” isn’t at issue here. Rather, we are interested in how the wavefunctions behave under certain conditions. If a particle is “localized” that means that its wavefunction doesn’t spread out over time. Instead, it stays more or less where it was put initially. Bell labs scientist and 1977 Nobel laureate Philip Anderson theorized single particle localization in the 1950s, proposing that disorder can localize a particle notwithstanding quantum tunneling or other effects that might cause it to spread out or move. As disorder increases in a quantum system, you get something called an Anderson transition from a state where particles are all nonlocalized (oozed out all over the place) to one where they are fixed in place. This commonly occurs in electronics where the nonlocalized phase is referred to as a metallic phase since electrons can flow freely. The disorder typically comes from some randomly fluctuating potential like a magnetic field, internal disordered interactions, or an external kick force. Localization is a bad thing in thin wires where you want electrons to move. One way to think of it is that in order to move from one place to another a quantum particle like an electron has to propagate as a wave. When you have a lot of disorder, the wave gets a lot of destructive interference and has trouble propagating anywhere. But, if you have a wave that travels from a point A to a point B and back again to A and another wave that goes by the same path in the opposite direction, it turns out that you get constructive interference — they build on each other. These cycles happen all over the place meaning that the electron wavefunction gets boosted over and over again at the initial location until it is exponentially more likely to be there than somewhere else. Localization is a general concept too that applies not only to location but also to any aspect of a particle, including spin. Spin of course is the property of elementary particles to have angular momentum in particular values like 1/2, 1, 3/2, 2, and so on. Spin can propagate much like location by interacting with other particles or random fields. Yet, localization can constrain it to particular values. Spin is important here because it is frequently used to store information in quantum computers. Many Body Localization (MBL) is the extension of the localization concept to many interacting particles so that a whole configuration of them has a localized set of values. With strings of atoms of sufficiently high disorder, spin and energy cannot move through the system because of interference coupled with short-range conservation laws similar to the case of the electron above. Localization implies a persistence of the initial state forever in either the MBL or single particle case. Thermalization, however, requires all initial states to be forgotten. A localized system cannot run down because nothing is able to move away from the initial state. Localization is the first step towards creating a time crystal. The second part for an MBL state to become a time crystal is you have to have a pairing of superpositions of states, sometimes called Schrödinger’s cat states, between chains of interacting atoms. These atoms all have spins (up and down) which represent quantum bits or qubits. And the pairs of states are strings of these qubits and their inversion (0 to 1 and 1 to 0). Using what is called a Floquet circuit, the researchers are able to cycle the system of qubits between these states over time, first one superposition, then its opposite, then back again. That cycle is the time crystal. Google used a setup with 20 superconducting qubits. These qubits are tightly coupled in order to have the long-range order required for an MBL state. The Google team also kicks the qubits periodically with a laser pulse to rotate the spins of the atoms. This periodic pulse causes the qubits to periodically flip depending on how much it alters the spin. It flips them on a scale from every four pulses to every two depending on how it is set up. They also designed new quantum computing gates (Controlled Phase or CPHASE gates) to ensure they could fine tune the model to maximize the disorder needed for the MBL state. The researchers showed how when the pulse doesn’t rotate the spins enough the qubits just thermalize from their initial state as expected. When they increase the kick rotation, they see robust flipping between two states at a period twice the period of the circuit, but not necessarily the period of the pulse. For example, the pulse might happen every 0.45 the period of the time crystal rather than 0.5 so they end up offset from each other. Thus, the circuit is breaking the discrete time symmetry of the pulse. This is an amazing demonstration of a long theorized phenomena: Many-Body Localization from disorder, discrete time crystal behavior (essentially the quantum version of the Kapitza pendulum), and a very neat trick to do in a quantum computer which may have practical applications. What it isn’t is a violation of thermodynamics nor is any of it unexplained with current quantum theory. Now, if anyone could demonstrate a continuous time crystal that drives itself that would blow the top off of known physics, but, short of using a wormhole or some other Einsteinean mechanism, I doubt it will ever happen.
Thanks for posting that Three problems for us = Understanding the idea , describing it , understanding the description . A LOT of whats being said is being lost in the description / reporting . Its a BIG problem ......... we have several links all talking about the same thing but describing it differently . Some with very complicated ideas and terminology ....... and some not . Things like ' time crystals ' , ' crystals ' , ' Symetry ' . Thats often the case with scientific studys . People try to read and understand them and get lost in pseudoscientific or unneeded terminology complication . My opiniion is that if a person cant give a basic explanation of whats going on that a child can understand the person doesnt understand it themselves . Part of the confusion comes because we're talking about two different things = 1 - The original experiment / article linked and its ' explanation ' and 2 - Definitions and examples of ' Time crystals ' . The link before last is cool because its very complicated science ....... but ends with ---- > ' Could the postulated cyclic evolution of the Universe be seen as a manifestation of spontaneous symmetry breaking akin to that of a time crystal? If so, who is the observer inducing—by a measurement—the breaking of the symmetry of time? ' https://physics.aps.org/articles/v5/116 From my ' understanding ' of the first article = They have a system at rest . They apply energy to it ....... but they say that energy has no effect ........ is not absorbed ...... is not diminished ........ theres no heat ...... but the aplication of the energy caused a phase change . That cant be true because the energy applyed has to be of a certain strength otherwise the particles dont flip = the flip has something to do with the energy applyed . The last link says whats happening and whats not happening and why ........ and thats clear .......... but it doesnt clear that up whats said in the first report . . Thats what i want to know = How does it work ? Why ?
It's bozos trying to impress other bozos and all are BS-ing each other, based on nothing, all empty but trying to look very clever, trying to get their hands on a lot of money going into funding all kinds of weird research, tons of which is utter rubbish... That's what it looks like to me, a lay person. And I can see the same BS in my professional field all the time... The jargon is there to obscure, not to illuminate! But time will tell if these bozos actually understand anything at all...
>It's bozos trying to impress other bozos and all are BS-ing each other, based on nothing, all empty but trying to look very clever, trying to get their hands on a lot of money going into funding all kinds of weird research, tons of which is utter rubbish... That's what it looks like to me, a lay person. ' For primative people any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'
Primitive, you mean. We have results with breaking up the atom etc. Ergo, no one here is 'primitive' but the question is "what remains when you remove the heavy jargon"?!? Can anyone explain it in simple terms anyone can understand? If no (and it looks that way to me), then I have my doubts. In physics or philosophy, it matters not!