back to article Microsoft thinks time crystals may be viable after all

Microsoft researchers have teamed up with physicists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, to show how time crystals might be possible. First proposed by Nobel-prize winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, time crystals are hypothetical systems that spontaneously break time-translational symmetry (TTS) – a …

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  1. Richard Wharram

    Buh?

    I, err, what?

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Buh?

      Dabbsie will explain it better - with a bacon sandwich analogy

      1. agatum

        Re: Buh?

        Dabbsie will explain it better - with a bacon sandwich analogy

        Probably. While waiting for his article I suspect it's about how all failing dynasties resort to magic. Romans did that and so did Numenoreans.

      2. chivo243 Silver badge

        Re: Buh?

        "Dabbsie will explain it better - with a bacon sandwich analogy?"

        Which might just be easier to understand?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Buh?

          Woosh!

          That was the sound of this article as it sped past my comprehension, not bothering to stop.

          Not a criticism as such and the words did make such pretty patterns on the page!

          1. Little Mouse

            Re: Buh?

            I think they're basically saying that Uri Geller has been right all along...

            Magic crystals. Crikey.

        2. Teiwaz

          Re: Buh?

          "Dabbsie will explain it better - with a bacon sandwich analogy?"

          ...Provided none of the bacon-holic el-Reg denizons actually eat the analogous bacon sandwich before Dabbsy gets the chance.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Buh?

          @chivo243 - (addressing bacon sarnie) "Understand this, sarnie!" (chomp!)

    2. John G Imrie

      Re: Buh?

      Indeed. I'm sure I recognised all the words but I'm no wiser now than when I started. I think we need a warning on these types of articles smiler to NSFW. I propose YBMM which stands for Your Brain May Melt

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: YBMM

        Surely some things might fit in both the NSFW and the YBMM categories ? Would some scale not be in order ? For NSFW one might use the feather to chicken scale, for YBMM the something to Hawking scale ? Put one on X and the other on Y, and I for one will skip all articles in the Hawking/Chicken section.

        1. Alan J. Wylie

          Re: YBMM

          Rule 34?

          1. Steve K

            Re: YBMM

            Mornington Crescent?

      2. Fungus Bob

        Re: YBMM

        I thought it stood for "Your Bowel Movement Moment".

        1. Sir Runcible Spoon

          Re: YBMM

          My takeaway from this was that people have known about spontaneous asymmetry for a while, but have never actually seen it.

          These guys think they have come up with an experiment that actually proves it.

          Cool (although I also admit a lot of it did whizz past).

    3. Pen-y-gors

      Re: Buh?

      I think you speak for almost all of us there! ('almost all' because there's bound to be a couple of Mekon-brainiacs reading this who actually understand it and can probably refute the mathematics)

      +1 for admitting ignorance. You are disqualified from standing for Parliament.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Buh?

      I think the author has overestimated her audience.

      My understanding of the article, based on the odd word I understood ( eg: "and" ) was perpetual motion. So that can't be right then. Anybody?

      1. asdf

        Re: Buh?

        >My understanding of the article, based on the odd word I understood ( eg: "and" ) was perpetual motion.

        Me too and then at the end it was mentioned it doesn't break the second law of thermodynamics which means then probably the phenomenon if it exists won't be directly useful to our everyday life for quite some time if much at all. Still worth investigating I suppose or else another Syndrome will rule us all with his zero point energy devices.

      2. Cuddles

        Re: Buh?

        "My understanding of the article, based on the odd word I understood ( eg: "and" ) was perpetual motion. So that can't be right then. Anybody?"

        Perpetual motion isn't actually impossible. For example, a simple two body system of a moon orbiting a planet will continue in motion forever in the absence of any other forces. In practice, such macroscopic inevitably do have other forces involved - friction in particular being a bit of a bugger - so things mostly come down to reducing them as much as possible and just getting really, really close to perpetual motion. And as it turns out, even in the absence of friction or any external force, relativity says such a system must emit gravitational waves and so over a very long time it will decay and not actually be perpetual.

        However, when we go to the quantum scale things, as usual, get a bit weird. An electron orbiting a proton (a hydrogen atom) is similar to the moon/planet system, but it turns out only discrete energy transitions are possible - an electron in the lowest energy state cannot lose any more energy and instead remains in "orbit" around the proton (the orbit analogy is obviously not actually correct, but the important point that the electron has energy and remains in motion is correct). That's what is called the "ground state", and it effectively means that every single atom, or indeed anything composed of more than a single particle, is in perpetual motion.

        What this research essentially says is that you can construct a crystal that also has a non-zero ground state energy and so behaves more like one of those quantum systems than a macroscopic system. The important part is says that the system "must never reach thermal equilibrium or radiate heat" - basically you set things up so that it can't ever lose energy, and instead remains in the non-zero energy ground state. In fact, even that isn't considered particularly strange in this field, the weird part is that it's not normally possible for a system in the ground state to spontaneously start doing something. An electron in hydrogen in its ground state was already "orbiting" and simply continues do so, while these crystals are the equivalent of taking a proton and electron with zero energy which spontaneously suddenly start orbiting each other. It's pretty weird even for quantum physics, but doesn't appear to actually be breaking any physical laws.

        Getting back to the perpetual motion thing, the reason this is generally the realm of the crackpot is that it's impossible to have perpetual motion and get energy out of the system at the same time. If you eliminate all losses you can have something in motion forever, but as soon as you take energy away it will stop moving. We can't use electrons in atoms as an infinite source of energy because the whole point is that it's impossible for them to lose any more energy. But understanding how electron energy states work has given us things like transistors and lasers, so even though these crystals won't give us any kind of free energy or useful perpetual motion, they could still lead to all kinds of useful things.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Buh?

          Thanks for the translation.

    5. thesykes

      Re: Buh?

      Phew... not just me then.

    6. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: Buh?

      I think the gist of it is that someone with a Nobel to their name (and who therefore presumably knows how thin the ice is this far out) reckons they have identifed a system which *in its lowest energy state* is in some sense "in motion". This is apparently a novelty. Furthermore, a group financed by Microsoft is now going to try and create that system to see if the wacky idea is true.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Buh?

        I understood more of the words in your post than I did in the article, however not in the order you put them in.

        So, when it's still, it's moving? Does that mean movement without energy being input?

    7. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Buh?

      I got as far as crystals which break symmetry in both space AND time dimensions, then my mind started drifting off along a tangent of "do they mean dilithium crystals?" before my train of thought finally reached the terminus at "ye canna break the laws o'physics" and Microsoft having a 'Q' continuum.

    8. swm
      Boffin

      Re: Buh?

      OK, here is what is going on. If you have a liquid it looks the same in all directions but when you cool it and freeze it there are certain preferred directions in a crystal lattice. So cooling a liquid "spontaneously" breaks rotational and translational symmetry. Certain directions are preferred for crystal planes and the atoms are now regularly spaced so the probability of finding an atom at a particular place is no longer uniform but a "comb" function.

      A time crystal is a material that is not the same at different times. It is like an oscillator that repeats itself so the phase repeats regularly. This is done at the quantum level so that there is no lower energy state to decay into.

      This is significant but the term "time crystal" invokes images of time travel etc. but it is really just a quantum oscillator that is in the lowest state. In general, spontaneous symmetry breaking is achieved by cooling.

  2. hplasm
    Devil

    In other news-

    Microsoft thinks Timecube is also viable.

    1. VinceH
      Joke

      Re: In other news-

      Microsoft thinks Windows 10 is successful/popular/wanted/a good idea.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: In other news-

        Microsoft thinks Windows 10 is successful/popular/wanted/a good idea.

        .. which pretty much annihilates any credibility they might have had :)

  3. Lee D Silver badge

    "and super uids break global gauge symmetry.”"

    Don't they just?!

    That's why you should never work as root.

    UID 0 is just dangerous.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Mushroom

    Microsoft

    Do we really want Microsoft fucking around with our time?

    They can't even get a web browser to work properly..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Microsoft

      "They can't even get a web browser to work properly.."

      ..or a mail service apparently. The new Namesco Demon replacement Office 365 email service's SMTP host blithely includes the BCC list in all the recipients' headers. Fortunately this was reported on a test email - so can be avoided for more sensitive future ones.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Microsoft

      I always though Microsoft had fucked around with time. Microsoft seems to waste so much of my time, with their bug ridden software updates.

      Microsoft 'Progress' seems to mean 90% software updates (rearranging the chairs, nothing new), 10% meaningful work of late (if I'm lucky) in between the waiting / diagnosing what just failed to update.

      Just to say. I understood this article more than Satya Nadella's keynotes.

    3. Rich 11

      Re: Microsoft

      Maybe they plan to go back in time and fix IE6 before they broke it.

    4. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

      Re: Microsoft - Messing around with time

      They already do just that....

      Ever seen the time estimates for a copy operation?

      One second it is showing 3 days and the next 2 minutes then 30 secs later it is 1 day. If that ain't messing with time then....

      1. Francis Boyle Silver badge

        Re: Microsoft - Messing around with time

        "Ever seen the time estimates for a copy operation?"

        You've got the wrong end of the stick. Messing around with the fundamentals of time is the only way they can think of to fix the problem.

      2. itzman
        Paris Hilton

        Re: Microsoft - Messing around with time

        I regularly get mails from Jan 1st 1970.

        I assiume time travel already exists.

        1. oldcoder

          Re: Microsoft - Messing around with time

          Of course it does - always forward. You will notice the message was sent before you got it.

          Now, getting one from 2970... :-)

      3. TeeCee Gold badge
        Happy

        Re: Microsoft - Messing around with time

        Ever seen the time estimates for a copy operation?

        You just outed yourself as a Vista User. That was brave.....and uncalled for.

    5. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Re: Microsoft

      Maybe they've missed their true vocation all these years? Maybe they were never meant to be a software company - but a cutting edge physics lab?

      Be smart, kids - see your local vocational guidance counsellor before deceiding on the career you want to pursue!

      1. Paul 129
        Angel

        Re: Microsoft

        "Maybe they've missed their true vocation all these years"

        I find it oddly comforting that the company that can only get things to roughly work, is the one supporting the idea that fundamentally the universe, 'kinda works' too.

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Flame

      Re: Microsoft

      Oh, not to worry, it is not time that they seem to be messing with, but more the energy state of a system. I am certain that if they accidentally create Ice 9 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle ) then we will all be safe!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Microsoft

        I knew there had to be a cat (or a Cat) in here somewhere.

  5. Lee D Silver badge

    "Software company invests in perpetual motion theories".

    Apart from that, I really can't make head nor tail of that article, and I have quite a good grasp of physics.

    And why Microsoft would care, I can't even fathom.

    1. Alister

      And why Microsoft would care, I can't even fathom.

      Well, obviously, it's so they can improve the operation of their progress bars.

      As we all know, Microsoft employ their own custom time algorithms for calculating the time left for file transfers and downloads: who hasn't seen the "time left" value oscillate between "32 seconds" and "2 days eleven hours and 51 minutes" when copying a file.

      However, this is obviously not enough, and the ability to actually stretch and manipulate time to suite their algorithms is eminently more sensible to Microsoft than actually making their algorithms reflect reality.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        >who hasn't seen the "time left" value oscillate between "32 seconds" and "2 days eleven hours and 51 minutes" when copying a file.

        Activity: copying [by drag n drop] a music folder from HDD to SD card, then dragging over several more folders.

        Expected behaviour: First folder is copied completely, then the second, then the third.... then the Nth.

        Observed behaviour: Windows attempts to copy files from all folders at once, so the HDD spends most of its time seeking data rather than reading it. "Time left" goes up to days.

        Work around: select all desired folders first (holding Ctrl).

        Is there a reason MS implemented copying in this way?

        1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

          More on MS Copy

          Has anyone noticed that they copy the last selected folder first.

          1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

            Re: More on MS Copy

            It has been my theory for years that there is a well hidden rand() function somewhere - maybe not in the copy function itself, but certainly in the bit that generates the progress bar.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: More on MS Copy

              "[...] hidden rand() function somewhere - maybe not in the copy function itself, but certainly in the bit that generates the progress bar."

              Generating a progress bar is not as simple as one thinks initially. There are at least three variables for any file.

              1) the overhead of finding/creating each file in the directory and the resource handshaking needed.

              2) the amount of data in the file.

              3) the head movement to access the file's data if it is fragmented across the disk.

              Small files are particularly affected by 1 - with the actual data transfer being almost inconsequential. The same overhead on large files would be smaller compared to the time taken to transfer its data. However a seriously fragmented large file would then be slowed down by random head movements.

              As large folder copies have files that are rarely homogeneous in respect of 2 and 3 - then the above effects would make it difficult for any progress algorithm to extrapolate based on the total number/size of files it has already transferred.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: More on MS Copy

                4) any competition for cpu or disk access from other processes in the machine

              2. oldcoder

                Re: More on MS Copy

                Actually, the randomness of the copy shows the instability of the system - with apparent random amounts of overhead causing the estimated completion time to be useless.

              3. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

                Re: More on MS Copy

                Not a programmer I take it?

                progress = byteswritten / totalbytes

                estimatedduration = totalbytes / byteswritten * elapsedtime

                For copying one or more files, that's it. The longer it runs the more accurate and stable it becomes. And it will never, ever go backwards. Fucking this one up is bad enough, but leaving it that way for twenty years is what really beggars belief.

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