Google’s ‘time crystals’ could be the greatest scientific achievement of our lifetimes

The Next Web ^ | 7/30/2021 | Tristan Greene

[LibWhacker]

Eureka! A research team featuring dozens of scientists working in partnership with Google‘s quantum computing labs may have created the world’s first time crystal inside a quantum computer.

This is the kind of news that makes me want to jump up and do a happy dance.

These scientists may have produced an entirely new phase of matter. I’m going to do my best to explain what that means and why I personally believe this is the most important scientific breakthrough in our lifetimes.

However, for the sake of clarity, there’s two points I need to make first:

1. Time crystals are a wickedly difficult concept to understand and even harder to explain.

2. The Google team might have created time crystals. This is pre-print research and has yet to receive full peer-review. Until the rest of the scientific community has time to review and replicate the work, we can’t say for sure it’s legitimate.

What’s a time crystal?

In colloquial terms, it’s a big screw you to Sir Isaac Newton.

Time crystals are a new phase of matter. For the sake of simplicity, let’s imagine a cube of ice.

When you put a cube of ice in glass of water, you’re introducing two separate entities (the ice cube and the liquid water) to each other at two different temperatures.

Everyone knows that the water will get colder (that’s why we put the ice in there) and, over time, the ice will get warmer and turn into water. Eventually you’ll just have a glass of room-temperature water.

We call this process “thermal equilibrium.”

Most people are familiar with Newton’s first law of motion, it’s the one that says “an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion.”

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 always moving towards entropy. In other words: if we isolate an ice cube and a room-temperature glass of water from all other external forces, the water will always melt the ice cube.

The entropy (the movement towards change) of any system will always remain the same if there are no processes, and it will always increase if there are processes.

Since our universe has stars exploding, black holes sucking, and people lighting things on fire – chemical processes – entropy is always increasing.

Except when it comes to time crystals. Time crystals don’t give a damn what Newton or anyone else thinks. They’re lawbreakers and heart takers. They can, theoretically, maintain entropy even when they’re used in a process.

What’s that mean

Think about a crystal you’re familiar with, such as a snowflake. Snowflakes aren’t just beautiful because each one is unique, they’re also fascinating formations that nearly break the laws of physics themselves.

Crystalline structures form in the physical world because, for whatever fundamental scientific reason, the atoms within them “want” to exist in certain exact points.

“Want” is a really weird word to use when we’re talking about atoms – I’m certainly not implying they’re sentient – but it’s hard to describe the tendency toward crystalline structures in abstracts such as “why.”

A time crystal is a new phase of matter that, simplified, would be like having a snowflake that constantly cycled back and forth between two different configurations. It’s a seven-pointed lattice one moment and a ten-pointed lattice the next, or whatever.

What’s amazing about time crystals is that when they cycle back and forth between two different configurations, they don’t lose or use any energy.

Time crystals can survive energy processes without falling victim to entropy. The reason they’re called time crystals is because they can have their cake and eat it too.

They can be in a state of having eaten the whole cake, and then cycle right back to a state of still having the cake – and they can, theoretically, do this forever and ever.

Most importantly, they can do this inside of an isolated system. That means they can consume the cake and then magically make it reappear over and over again forever, without using any fuel or energy.

Who cares? What’s 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.

Nearly every far-future tech humans can imagine, from teleportation to warp drives and from artificial food synthesizers to perpetual motion reactors capable of powering the world without burning fuels or harnessing energy, will require quantum computing systems.

Quantum computers can solve really hard problems. Unfortunately, they’re brittle. It’s hard to build them, hard to maintain them, hard to get them to do anything, and even harder to interpret the results they give. This is because of something called “decoherence,” which works a lot like entropy.

Computer bits in the quantum world, qubits, share a funky feature of quantum mechanics that makes them act differently when observed than when they’re left alone. That sort of makes any direct measurements of qubit states (reading the computer’s output) difficult.

But time crystals want to be coherent. So putting them inside a quantum computer, and using them to conduct computer processes could potentially serve an incredibly important function: ensuring quantum coherence.

So Google solved quantum computing?

No. No, no, no, no no. Don’t get me wrong. This is baby steps. This is infancy research. This is Antony van Leeuwenhoek becoming the first person to use a microscope to look at a drop of water under magnification.

What Google‘s done, potentially, is prove that humans can manufacture time crystals. In the words of the researchers themselves:

These results establish a scalable approach to study non-equilibrium phases of matter on current quantum processors.

Basically they believe they’ve proven the concept, so now it’s time to see what can be done with it.

Then why is this so exciting?

Time crystals have always been theoretical. And by “always,” I mean: since 2012 when they were first hypothesized.

If Google‘s actually created time-crystals, it could accelerate the timeline for quantum computing breakthroughs from “maybe never” to “maybe within a few decades.”

At the far-fetched, super-optimistic end of things – we could see the creation of a working warp drive in our lifetimes. Imagine taking a trip to Mars or the edge of our solar system, and being back home on Earth in time to catch the evening news.

And, even on the conservative end with more realistic expectations, it’s not hard to imagine quantum computing-based chemical and drug discovery leading to universally-effective cancer treatments.

This could be the big eureka we’ve all been waiting for. I can’t wait to see what happens in peer-review.

If you want to know more, you can read Google’s paper here. And if you’re looking for a technical deep-dive into the scientific specifics of what the researchers accomplished in the lab, this piece on Quanta Magazine by Natalie Wolchover is the bee’s knees.

[GingisK]

Google, a leftist anti-Constitution entity with this? Jesus wept.

[RoosterRedux]

Bump

[Buttons12]

TTIUW/OP.

[LibWhacker]

I notice nobody’s thanked you for the chuckle yet, so... THANKS! :-)

[MattMusson]

ICE 9

[shotgun]

Calling Doctor Rick Marshall, your tachyon crystals are ready.

[papasmurf]

I say that to myself several times a day.

[BiteYourSelf]

So,when are they going to build a TARDIS.🤔

[Drago]

This brings back memories of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann and “Cold Fusion”.

https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/cold_fusion_01

[fieldmarshaldj]

I’ll bet the author can make his anus dilate at will.

[rlmorel]

I must say, there are a lot of people who will do that “Happy Dance” (as Freeper PTBAA alluded to with the justified sarcasm) and there was once a time I would have done it myself, and quite happily, too.

Damn it.

I feel like a simple idiot in retrospect. For so many years, I naively looked only at the possible good that came from technology.

I looked at it digital technology the way many farmers back in the 19th Century looked at newfangled Combine that combined reaping and threshing into one action...it cut back on work...it took in the harvest faster in less time with fewer people...what could be bad about a Combine? Sure, there were those who thought “I’m sticking with my horse drawn reaper and thresher! No damn newfangled bull-hooey for me!” but I suspect most farmers saw the promise in a combine and the ease of hard work and time savings. Many would save all their money or go into hock to buy one.

But I made a grave mistake looking at digital technology that same way. A combine is ill suited to a duality of purpose...its upside was massive, and the downside...much smaller.

However, digital and related technology DOES have a duality of purpose. When I say duality of purpose, I often use a claw hammer as an example. With a claw hammer, you can build a beautiful house with it, or...you can bash in the brains of another human being.

I now see digital technology in much the same way, and while absolutely it does have a large upside, it also has a massive downside which I had not only disregarded my entire life...I did not even have the imagination to conceive of it.

And not just a downside of societal and human relationship proportions, such as a family at four having breakfast in a hotel where all four, instead of talking and interacting with each other, have their faces glued to their smart phones.

An evil downside.

An evil downside where a modern government like the Chinese Communists and the United States can take tyranny and persecution to new levels and places that even East Germany (who was the master in their time of an efficient tyranny with the detail and thoroughness that it surveilled and persecuted its own citizens) could never have dreamed of going.

Coupled with AI, cheap data storage, high speed networks, and surveillance cameras, coupled with an unsuspecting (or indifferent) citizenry, we may already be far down that road that Winston Churchill only hinted at in 1940, of an “abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

[rlmorel]

I used to think Google was great. You could find the answer to nearly anything.

I used to use Google all the time, and at some point, the results I began to get back were...well...not what I wanted. I found what I was looking for several pages back, and I believe it is standard behavior for a lot of people not to go that far. So they end up clicking on what Google provides to them.

I began paying attention, and realized that even though I KNEW that Google "shaped" its returns via paid ads and such...I came to realize it wasn't doing it strictly from a commerce perspective which is what I expected...it was doing it from a political perspective, and an extreme Leftist anti-American perspective.

I had never paid much attention to the stupid "Google Doodles", almost as if I were blind to them. When I began paying attention to them at the same time I began viewing their political shaping of returns, it confirmed my conclusions.

What really shook me as it took several years for this to fully sink in, is that there are probably 4 billion computer users on Earth today who view Google as the font of information about...history, politics, science, you name it. And Google has decided it wants to manipulate the thoughts and conclusions of people using its product using the subtle forces of AI, to mold and shape "correct thought" in people.

Bill Whittle did a masterful video recently called The Stolen Election Part II: Stoners and Reptiles

The whole video is worth watching, but his interpretation and presentation of the Big Tech interference in the election is critical. Near the end, if you go to the 14 minute mark of the video, he discusses a video, created for top level Google executives (and meant only for their eyes) that was leaked to the public called "The Selfish Ledger".

Bill Whittle calls it the most frightening thing he has yet seen from the Left, and I agree with him.

It describes how Google views our "ledger" to be compiled by the compilation of our online activities into a "fingerprint" of who and what we are, and likens it to our DNA that identifies us, and how they wish to alter that DNA-like "Ledger" to manipulate people to "think the right way".

Chilling. Even though you sound like you understand this aspect of Google fully, I highly recommend it.

[Vaduz]

Google finds alternative to selling magic beans?.

[Oil Object Insp]

“Want is a really weird word to use when we’re talking about atoms – I’m certainly not implying they’re sentient”

Atom, electron, quark, some “building blocks” perhaps smaller, the little “i”, as in intelligence, as a singular entity.

Back in ‘92 while living in Davis I had thought of mind during a conversation with others to write down and make a drawing siting this exact thought.

I’ve had a rule since then that any idea I’ve come up with, someone else much smarter has almost certainly had already, is just that I’m not well and widely enough read to have come across it yet. I treat all knowledge this way. Everything. Car mechanical, computer software ability or function, gardening, everything.

Maybe seems a stretch, but if matter can be commanded it has to have the ability to recognize the direction or command.

Things follow natural law. Even before Newton or any other great knowledge seeker noted the laws of this planet and universe, the natural laws have ran through their course. Gravity, Magnetism, Aerodynamics, Thermo, fluid all the other dynamics are laws, even if we still don’t fully understand them and how they work.

It shows no accidents, just natural laws......and all the knowledge already exists, it will be learned or shared.

[Gene Eric]

Smart move taking those notes. Imagination and practice certainly go hand-in-hand. And I appreciate the mindset of reduction — should be the foundational tenets in the teaching of mathematics.

Quantum entanglement is an area of interest for me. You may find parallels to your thoughts on commanding matter/energy.

[perfect stranger]

This is a great version of that song from ‘The Muppet Show’.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XF8ZgguyQ3Y&t=61s

[BenLurkin]

“Just as a crystal’s structure repeats in space, a time crystal repeats in time and, importantly, does so infinitely and without any further input of energy—like a clock that runs forever without any batteries. The quest to realize this phase of matter has been a longstanding challenge in theory and experiment—one that has now finally come to fruition.”

“In research published Nov. 30 in Nature, a team of scientists from Stanford University, Google Quantum AI, the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems and Oxford University detail their creation of a time crystal using Google’s Sycamore quantum computing hardware.”

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-physicists-crystals-quantum.html

[Tijeras_Slim]

Mine all got turned into shrimp ramen.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin.

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[Mariner]

“Nearly every far-future tech humans can imagine, from teleportation to warp drives and from artificial food synthesizers to perpetual motion reactors capable of powering the world without burning fuels or harnessing energy, will require quantum computing systems.”

And a new, different physical reality.