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from the are-laws-of-thermodynamics-overrated? dept.
Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real:
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." In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond.
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 Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper. 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.
[...] "This is just this completely new and exciting space that we're working in now," said Vedika Khemani, a condensed matter physicist now at Stanford who co-discovered the novel phase while she was a graduate student and co-authored the new paper with the Google team.
Journal Reference:
Mi, Xiao, Ippoliti, Matteo, Quintana, Chris, et al. Observation of Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor, (DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13571)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 31 2021, @05:18AM
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. It's no good if it's true.
You need to be able to bring your understanding and knowledge to the wider society.
Let's put it this way. If technology at whatever level X requires a certain intelligence level and a certain amount of actual energy/effort to build the understanding of that technology into your brain, there's a certain percentage of the population who we will not educate to that technology.
As the required intelligence and effort rises, so too do the opportunity costs. We have other stuff to do!
Problem is, the error rate goes up. We're checking the results far fewer times. There will be more errors, and progress will slow, simply because catching the errors is one core way we evolve our model: science.
That's why you need to ELI-5. To make science work the way it's supposed to. When you claim to break something we spent generations educating the population on, you need to expend similar effort to help us understand the new information.