Inside a quantum computer, Google claims to have created a time crystal.

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Breaking the Laws of Physics

Scientists claim to have finally found out how to make a time crystal, a scientific oddity that could prove to be a watershed event for fundamental physics and quantum physics.

Time crystals take advantage of a physics quirk that allows them to change constantly while being dynamically stable.
In other words, they don’t emit energy when they change conformation, which appears to be a breach of the natural law that states that everything eventually decays into entropy and chaos According to Quanta Magazine, it now appears that these entities may exist after all.

At least, that’s what a large group of researchers from Stanford, Princeton, and other universities working with Google’s quantum computing labs claimed in a preprint paper published last week.

Aside from being an amazing scientific discovery in and of itself — time crystals are a new, strange phase of matter — the discovery could have huge implications for the finicky world of quantum computing. Roderich Moessner, research coauthor and head of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, told Quanta, “The result is amazing: you circumvent the second law of thermodynamics.”

Computing with Crystals

This research essentially means that specialists believe they’ve worked out how to transport time crystals from theoretical abstraction — a world they’ve been in since they were initially envisioned around a decade ago — to concrete reality, as The Next Web points out.

The authors of the new paper claim to have experimentally demonstrated a time crystal for the first time, putting them ahead of many previous attempts in the field — Quanta points out that many researchers have claimed to have created or observed the first time crystal, including a group of scientists who shared a similarly unverified study in early July, but that none of them were up to snuff.

“There are good reasons to believe that none of those experiments completely succeeded, and a quantum computer like [Google’s] would be particularly well placed to do much better than those earlier experiments,” said John Chalker, a physicist at the University of Oxford who wasn’t involved in the study.

If the new discovery stands up under investigation and someone succeeds to put these time crystals to use in a practical fashion, we may soon be living in a world with practical, powerful quantum computers that can do all we’ve been led to believe they can.