Time Crystals Explained | Answers With Joe

I recently did a live stream about the subject of time crystals, but there was much more to talk about. So here you go.

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When you hear the term Time Crystals, you immediately think of something cool and sci-fi like something from Doctor Who, but spoilers… Not so much.

That doesn’t mean they’re not interesting, they’re super-interesting, just… Not what powers a Tardis.

The explanation that we keep hearing is that time crystals are crystals whose atomic structures repeat in space and in time.

Like the reason crystals become crystals is the way the atoms of particular elements bond with each other in certain patterns that repeat over and over again.

That’s repeating in three dimensions.

But time crystals repeat in four dimensions. They also repeat in time.

Time as a construct relies on cause and effect, one thing preceding the other, always working toward equilibrium, or a zero energy state.

If you have a row of atoms repeating in a crystal, and you send energy along that line, it will pass through one atom, then another, all the way down until the system returns to equilibrium, or zero point energy.

But with time crystals, atoms are connected through quantum entanglement in repeating patterns so that atoms down the chain would feel the effect before the cause, so energy sent down the line would repeat over and over again, making it impossible to return to equilibrium.

That’s why they’re also called non-equilibrium matter.

And that’s also why you hear so many people describe it as jello that never stops jiggling. Because even in its lowest energy state, the atoms never stop moving.

Now, one question I got asked a lot in the livestream was if this breaks the law of conservation of momentum.

And the answer is… Yes. It very does. Which is why this was such a big deal. And it’s something I don’t think I fully grasped in the livestream.

There’s an even more fundamental law of the universe known as time translation symmetry which states that the laws of physics must work the same way everywhere at all times.

And if you have matter that moves without using any energy, that sounds a lot like the laws of physics working differently.

But when Nobel-prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek introduced the idea in 2012, he proposed a loophole.

He stated that if symmetry is broken explicitly, then the laws of nature do not have symmetry anymore. But he argued that there’s such a thing as spontaneously broken symmetry, which means that the laws of nature still has symmetry, but nature chooses a system that does not.

In other words, if the laws of nature allow these atoms to arrange in this way, then they’re still being loyal to the laws of nature.

Regardless, the idea is tantalizing enough that teams of researchers have been working on it since then, and just this year, two different teams announced that they’d pulled it off.

The first team from the University of Maryland, lead by Chris Monroe, took 10 ytterbium atoms and used one laser to create an electromagnetic field around the atoms, which entangled the various atoms, before blasting it with a second laser that jostled the atoms.

And as predicted, once the energy was introduced, it never stopped. In fact, it started jiggling at a different rate than the laser introduced into it.

This was a non-equilibrium state.

But the team at Harvard did it a totally different way, by using molecules from nitrogen vacancy centers, which are tiny flaws in diamonds.

But the fact that they used such different methods is encouraging, it may be that these aren’t that hard to produce and there may be hundreds of ways to do it.

Which is great because there really are some cool applications for this.

First of all, it makes the perfect timepiece.

If you have a type of matter that oscillates at a specific frequency naturally, that’s about as accurate as you can get.

But the most exciting application is for quantum computing because the entangled atoms in the atomic structure could allow stable qubits of information to be stored.

Now, as always, we have to take these kinds of announcements with grains of salt.

These kinds of major discoveries often have ways of falling apart under scrutiny, so we’ll have to wait and see how this holds up to peer review and future experimentation, but still… pretty exciting stuff.

[GabrielKnightz]

"Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it. And that's a place to start. That's where the hope is." ~Dana Scully

[gutserker]

Your channel reached the Channel Singularity, a point of critical mass for the Google AI to bless your channel with recommendation status.

[marccolten]

This came out two years ago and this is the first time I've ever heard of time crystals

[sicdavid]

Apparently Google just created time crystals with their quantum computer. Once again Joe you're just way ahead of the Curve

[imaginationgirl]

I've dropped out of my college and I am now enrolled in the university of Joe Scott

[MattSean]

Dude. I don't give a DAMN what ANY hater has to say about your channel.

You are so damn funny. Your videos are so entertaining and you are beyond funny. The sound effects and your facial expressions and jokes are hilarious.

So much love coming from me! Keep it up!

[KevinVerstegen]

My new favorite channel. You are honest, and admit that you can make mistakes. I love that in a science show. Science is not trying to be right all the time. It is trying to disprove all the other possibilities so we will get closer to the right answer. And there might be no right answer at all! At least you show us this and you help us understand what we didn't before. Keep going bro.

[carlcox]

I love how this guy is always completely honest when he's not entirely knowledgeable on a subject and only shares what he does understand about it while inviting feedback from other people to share their understanding. While at the same time putting comical twist to his videos. I really enjoy watching these videos

[markkim]

Salt is also a crystal!

Oh this is one of the best jokes I've heard in the last two months (it's now march in Australia)

[harrywilson]

Entanglement does mean the particles feel the effect before the cause: it's not that "what you do to one particle happens to the other", it means that there is a correlation between the two particles. For example, maybe one particle is spin up and the other is spin down, you don't know which is which but you know they're opposite.
Also the difference between spontaneously broken symmetry and explicitly broken symmetry isn't really a cheat. Some physicists actually call spontaneously broken symmetry "hidden symmetry" (also one hears "non-linearly realised symmetry
" for essentially the same thing) to emphasise that the symmetry is still there, it's just that the ground state isn't invariant.

[quantquill]

"Of course they used a diamond, because Harvard." HA! *That's* the moment I clicked to subscribe. Great job illustrating the concept with the entangled electrons getting zapped.

[JaeElle]

I'm really enjoying this channel. I'm stuck in bed a lot with my illness and rather than melt my brain to mush I try to watch entertaining channels that teach me something... this channel is in my top 5 for sure. I greatly appreciate your research and videos. Thank you!!!

[BrunoSousaMaio]

And a few days ago, Google's quantum labs supposedly managed to create time crystals... this is insane

[onceonly]

Just read about this today for the first time so I'm surprised to see your video is from over a year ago. The explanation about cause happening before effect is really interesting, I'm amazed that there are people who can make sense of this stuff.

[max-]

Who’s here after we first observed time crystals?

[learningtech]

A key question: What exactly is an effect that occurs "before" its cause? Considering that by definition an effect is "a change which is a result or consequence of an action or other cause". This implies the concept of an arrow of time within a Minkoswki space. If something occurs "before" its cause, this would require a different terminology. We simply would need a different relation between "cause and effect", alternative or beyond the arrow of time.

[CarFreeSegnitz]

Once the atoms are set in motion they do not stop. Does that mean time crystals are independent of temperature? Could I set the atoms in motion then drop it a super-cold liquid helium vat and they'd just keep vibrating? Sounds to me like a pretty big violation of thermodynamics.

[MARILYNANDERSON]

Time crystals are "black box" devices which output the signal before the signal is input. My last update was that this has been shown to be possible, with a time crystal outputting a signal a fraction of a milisecond before the input. Useful for shutting systems down before they are activated. Goals include gambling and bidding advantage, winning the lottery, avoiding accidents, etc.

[jacobhunwick]

Just subscribed recently, really enjoying your conversational style

[billybobdinges]

Nice job!  The best I found so far... Easy to understand and well put.