
The quest to crystallize time - jonbaer
http://www.nature.com/news/the-quest-to-crystallize-time-1.21595?href=
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dimillian
Any of you saw the movie "Arrival"? Without spoiling anything, it drops an
amazing concept, which is also exploited in the novel in a much subtler way,
and it's bugging me ever since.

In the movie, the "alien" are not perceiving time like us, they experience it
in a circular way, they also write in a circular way. There is no beginning
and no end to what they write, it just happen. The main character, after
having studied them for a long time, start to think like them, and she start
to experience time like them. So she merely exist in the present, past and
future, she just exist. You can take what you want, but for me it's like we
maybe simply exist, at any given time, we can remember or/and live our past
but also our future. We just exist, at any given moment of OUR time; You can
BE at anytime between your birth and death. We're maybe just stuck in our
current concept of time, like we maybe don't perceive other dimensions because
they are "hidden" to our way of experiencing our world.

Enough talk anyway.

~~~
ep103
Sounds like Philip K Dick's take on time. IIRC he had a mental breakdown at
one point, and believed this is exactly how time works. That at any moment,
you could be walking down the same street in 2000 AD, 4000AD, and 0 AD, and
the same stories would be or could be unfolding

~~~
orless
Actually based on a short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life)

~~~
wavefunction
Not from what I know. PK Dick towards the end of his life believed himself to
be living both in 1974 and as an early Christian named Thomas in the Levant
sometime in the first century CE contemporaneously.

~~~
orless
It's easy to check:

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/)

Writers: Eric Heisserer (screenplay), Ted Chiang (based on the story "Story of
Your Life" written by)

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jonbaer
Much of it was better explained a few years ago at
[https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130425-perpetual-motion-
tes...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130425-perpetual-motion-test-could-
amend-theory-of-time/)

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zamalek
I am not a physicist, but I'm seeing a similarity between time crystals and
the vacuum, as the vacuum results in quantum fluctuation - which is also a
form of activity at zero-point energy. This point of view means that the
vacuum could be contrived to be a time crystal. I'm clearly drawing an
incorrect conclusion, but why?

~~~
xelxebar
I think the crystal part is more about the symmetry breaking than the non-zero
energy part.

~~~
zamalek
Thanks, what an obvious miss.

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daveguy
Crystallization of time seems like a misnomer to me. Aren't they continually
adding laser energy to the system to maintain the "crystal" state? Doesn't
crystallization imply a stable state resistant to external energy sources
rather than dependent on them?

~~~
reptation
I tend to agree, but had a lot of trouble understanding the article (I studied
different branch of physics). I think this is the key:

"The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential:
a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact
with each other and an element of random disorder... More than that, the
researchers found that even if they started to flip the system in an imperfect
way, such as by slightly changing the frequency of the kicks, the oscillation
remained the same."

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GnarfGnarf
Time doesn't exist. It is simply an abstraction to measure the comparative
rates of the movement of matter.

All our measurements of time refer to the movement of matter: the rotation of
the Earth, the orbit of Earth around the Sun, the swinging of a pendulum, the
vibrations of a cesium atom.

Time travel is not possible. It would require the re-arrangements of atoms
into exactly their former position, which is precluded by entropy. Too bad.

There is no past or future. There is only the forever "now".

~~~
krapp
> Time doesn't exist. It is simply an abstraction to measure the comparative
> rates of the movement of matter.

You can't claim time doesn't exist, then offer a definition of time, which
_requires time to exist._

Also, general relativity would like to have a word with you after class.

~~~
nickpeterson
The point boils down to, is time invented or discovered?

Most science (I think) presumes that time was discovered (before recorded
history for obvious reasons).

Critics argue that it's invented to help orient our perspective of events.

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lngnmn
Bullshit. Whatever they think they have crystallized, according to an
interpretation of reading of their instruments, which uses statistics and
probability, is not time.

Time is a derived characteristic of an observed process and requires an
observer, so it does not exist as an independent phenomena. Whatever they have
convinced themselves it was, it is not time.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Yes, the scientists are full of bullshit, but your quasimystical
interpretation of requiring an observer is insightful.

I think your post is just nonsense. Particularly because you used the phrase
"crystalize time" rather than "crystalize matter in the time direction", which
makes me wonder if you even know what a time crystal is.

~~~
lngnmn
Yes, some "modern science" is no different from astrology or metaphysics,
nothing extraordinary here. Same dogmatic, unproven theological sectarian
arguments about abstract concepts and fancy theoretical models.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
This is literally a case of someone performing a test because the community
thought the concept couldn't happen (after some debate).

That's pretty much exactly the _opposite_ of dogmatic.

Let me ask you this, though: do you have a better idea of how to do science?
Because it sounds like you're just whining science isn't perfect and modern
science is hard/confusing.

~~~
lngnmn
The case of performing a computer simulation, or an empirical experiment?

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SomeStupidPoint
Empirical experiment.

Did you even read the article before ranting at the concept?

