Google’s ‘time crystals’ could be the greatest scientific achievement of our lifetimes – The Next Web

Eureka! A research team featuring dozens of scientists working in partnership with Googles quantum computing labs may have created the worlds 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. Im going to do my best to explain what that means and why I personally believe this is the most important scientificbreakthrough in our lifetimes.

However, for the sake of clarity, theres two points I need to make first:

In colloquial terms, its a big screw you to Sir Isaac Newton.

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

When you put a cube of ice in glass of water, youre 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 (thats why we put the ice in there) and, over time, the ice will get warmer and turn into water. Eventually youll just have a glass of room-temperature water.

We call this process thermal equilibrium.

Most people are familiar with Newtons first law of motion, its the one that says an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object inmotion 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 dont give a damn what Newton or anyone else thinks. Theyre lawbreakers and heart takers. They can, theoretically, maintain entropy even when theyre used in a process.

Think about a crystal youre familiar with, such as a snowflake. Snowflakes arent just beautiful because each one is unique, theyre 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 were talking about atoms Im certainly not implying theyre sentient but its 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. Its a seven-pointed lattice one moment and a ten-pointed lattice the next, or whatever.

Whats amazing about time crystals is that when they cycle back and forth between two different configurations, they dont lose or use any energy.

Time crystals can survive energy processes without falling victim to entropy. The reason theyre 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.

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, theyre brittle. Its 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 theyre left alone. That sort of makes any direct measurements of qubit states (reading the computers 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: ensuringquantum coherence.

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No. No, no, no, no no. Dont 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 Googles 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 theyve proven the concept, so now its time to see what can be done with it.

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

If Googles 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, its not hard to imagine quantum computing-based chemical and drug discovery leading to universally-effective cancer treatments.

This could be the big eureka weve all been waiting for. I cant wait to see what happens in peer-review.

If you want to know more, you can read Googles paper here. And if youre looking for a technical deep-dive into the scientific specifics of what the researchers accomplished in the lab, this piece on Quanta Magazine byNatalie Wolchover is the bees knees.

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Google's 'time crystals' could be the greatest scientific achievement of our lifetimes - The Next Web