DonRocks Posted April 10, 2017 Share Posted April 10, 2017 I'm up against the limits of my personal knowledge when it comes to time crystals, so I'm hoping someone can point us to a primer, or a prerequisite so the average person (that would be me!) can glean a basic understanding of what time crystals are, and how they apparently breach the second law of thermodynamics, which essentially says that perpetual motion is impossible. I won't go into much depth, but one of the simpler explanations I've found has been here: Feb 10, 2017 - "Discovery of Time Crystals Could Radically Change Our Understanding of the Space-Time Continuum" by Philip Perry on bigthink.com But it's still not simple enough. Does anyone know of a step-ladder we can use to peek over this fence? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DIShGo Posted April 12, 2017 Share Posted April 12, 2017 I asked my son, who is fascinated with the topic, for a link to an article explaining time crystals, and he sent me this: "Scientists Have Confirmed a Brand New Phase of Matter: Time Crystals" by Fiona MacDonald on sciencealert.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DonRocks Posted April 12, 2017 Author Share Posted April 12, 2017 If I'm understanding this correctly, if you take a photograph - a snapshot - of anything, it will look still. For example, if you take a picture of a coffee table at 1 PM, and again at 1:05 PM, it will not have moved (unless, of course, someone or something has moved it (*)). However, if you take a picture of a time crystal at 1 PM, and again at 1:05 PM, it *will* have moved, despite nothing having moved it, i.e, absolutely no force was applied. In other words, the time crystal is in perpetual motion, and *everything we've ever been taught about this* has been wrong! Is this a correct way of looking at the issue? If it is, then I don't think people realize just how important this is. A *lot* of the world's problems are going to be solved, assuming that the energy produced by the motion can be harnessed, and that there is nothing harmful produced by it. (*) This actually involves the Theory of Relativity - that coffee table, between 1 PM and 1:05 PM, will have moved thousands if not millions of miles, when you take into account the Earth's rotation, the Earth's revolution around the sun, the solar system revolving within the galaxy, the galaxy revolving around the galaxy cluster, etc., etc., and on-and-on including the expanding universe and most likely some elements of spacetime that we don't even understand - yeah, it's creepy, alright. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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