Google announces it may have created amazing ‘time crystals’ for physics

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Researchers from Google’s quantum computing division have just published a study to prepress server ArXiv that they claim have created physics-defying “time crystals” using the company’s quantum computer, and it’s impossible to say how big a deal that might appear to be.

As Quanta Magazine explains, a time crystal is stable and ever-changing, with specific states recurring at predictable intervals without ever decomposing into a completely random state.

Without getting bogged down in the ups and downs of qubits (the subatomic particles that can represent both 1 and 0 and that form the basis of quantum computing), what Google claims to have done is basically checkers a board with all the red bits on one side and all the black bits on the side The other and figuratively hitting the table in a way that completely switches sides without expending any energy.

The second law of thermodynamics says this simply can’t happen, but time crystals don’t seem to give a shout about entropy and now Google says it’s not only seen in action, but the process that produced them is scalable – and the implications of this could be enormous.

We need to reiterate that Google’s results have not been peer-reviewed, so we can’t say for sure that what Google researchers have done will stand up to scrutiny.

However, if what Google’s quantum computer has accomplished can be replicated, then time crystals are not only real, but may actually have some real-world uses. It is difficult to understand the implications of such technology on computer memory alone, let alone the processing of the computer itself.

Ultimately, it’s very hard to say what will come from an entropy-challenging system, because nature as we know it doesn’t work that way – and the entropy assumption is built into every system we’ve either produced or observed. We’ve never seen anything like this before, assuming these results hold up, so predicting what we can do with it is a really difficult but incredibly exciting puzzle.

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