<story><title>Physicists Create World’s First Time Crystal</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602541/physicists-create-worlds-first-time-crystal/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>davesque</author><text>I figured this article would fly over my head (which it mostly did), but it was actually a very fun read.  My main takeaway was the paradox that the interesting arrangement of matter could be in its lowest energy state, yet still moving.  And that no energy could be extracted from this movement.  I&amp;#x27;m probably butchering the concept with my misuse of terminology but whatevs.</text></comment>
<story><title>Physicists Create World’s First Time Crystal</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602541/physicists-create-worlds-first-time-crystal/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dysfunctor</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know anything about anything, but I want to enumerate some things I learned reading this article, and if someone actually knows what they&amp;#x27;re talking about and sees fit to take pity on me, please correct me so that I can understand what this actually means.&lt;p&gt;So a time crystal appears to be made up of real matter. The article mentions ions that are arranged in a certain particular way, cooled in order to reduce their energy, and this still makes sense so far.&lt;p&gt;So, the idea is to create a closed loop of sorts from a temporal perspective. I&amp;#x27;m imagining an object as a set of states that the object can be observed in, and if there was a loop, it&amp;#x27;d be possible to observe a certain sequence of states over and over.&lt;p&gt;The arrangement of the ions is important, and one of the properties is the spin, which is possible to change with a laser beam, because obviously.&lt;p&gt;Anyways, I guess the frequency of the oscillation of the ions changing spin, since they interact with each other in a domino fashion, can be controlled with the frequency of the laser.&lt;p&gt;They did this, and observed the ions changing in such a way where there was no driving influence and it&amp;#x27;s implied that the reason that this behavior was observed is because time symmetry was broken, which is just a fancy way of alleging that the universe is non-deterministic, I think.&lt;p&gt;Maybe this will eventually be useful?</text></comment>