#time crystals

Time crystals could become accurate and efficient timekeepers

Time crystals could one day provide a reliable foundation for ultra-precise quantum clocks, new mathematical analysis has revealed. Published in Physical Review Letters, the research was led by Ludmila Viotti at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy. The team shows that these exotic systems could, in principle, offer higher timekeeping precision than more conventional designs, which rely on external excitations to generate reliably repeating oscillations. In physics, a crystal can be defined as any system that hosts a repeating pattern in its microscopic structure. In conventional crystals, this pattern repeats in space—but more exotic behavior can emerge in materials whose configurations repeat over time. Known as "time crystals," these systems were first demonstrated experimentally in 2016. Since then, researchers have been working to understand the full extent of their possible applications.

(You can respond in the notes if you picked the last option — I’d love to hear your reasoning.)

I'll start this one by saying it's reaaaaally suspicious that we weren't shown how Evil Morty turned off Rick Prime's regeneration schtick.

He obviously did do it, because Rick C-137 successfully punched him to death, but we weren't shown the process. I guess, since he managed to hack into Rick Prime's brain and got access to aaaaaaaaall his weapons, schematics, implants, etc, it wasn't particularly difficult to turn off whatever implant granted Rick Prime this ability. I wasn't particularly surprised when he didn't recover from Rick C-137's punches; Evil Morty is very thourough.

But why weren't we shown the action of it being turned off? Was it unnecessary? Was it to reduce screen time? Or was it plot-relevant?

...Does this really look like regeneration?

Compare it with Rick C-137 sorta fixing himself:

Aaaaall the blood stays where it was spilled.

While Rick Prime becomes completely clean (although the tears in his clothes remain, a whole sleeve reforms):

...Where did all the blood go...?

Is it like he "regenerated"...?

...or is it more like...

...whatever happened to his body physically was...

...undone?

And I think this is interesting:

Rick C-137 has exactly ZERO obligations, no job. He also has FREE TIME.

But... what if Rick Prime LITERALLY had "free time".

As in: a free supply of time crystals (maybe granted to him by Slow Mobius, whose death "hurt [Rick Prime] too") allowing him to LITERALLY have AS MUCH TIME AS HE WANTED, for EVERYTHING.

Which would also explain why he's young.

WTF

“Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.

In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal.” In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond.

A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.

“The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” said Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper. That’s the law that says disorder always increases.

Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break “time-translation symmetry,” the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time.

The time crystal is a new category of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is. All other known phases, like water or ice, are in thermal equilibrium: Their constituent atoms have settled into the state with the lowest energy permitted by the ambient temperature, and their properties don’t change with time. The time crystal is the first “out-of-equilibrium” phase: It has order and perfect stability despite being in an excited and evolving state.