Time Crystal, Breaking the laws of physics

Big news! It has been announced the there is a new form of matter that was once thought to break laws of physics and its has been created by scientists. This extremely strange material repeats a crystal-like structure in (and get this) the fourth dimension! time, rather than just in space. Pretty awesome right!

This never seen before matter is completely new and is being called a “time crystal” which is a name we think Emmett “Doc” Brown would be proud of (for those who don’t know who he is watch Back to the future you’ll love it). This majestic new time crystal was recently created by not a single group of scientists but two teams of scientists in a feat that was once considered theoretically impossible. Normal crystals, anything from the snowflake that we wish for at Christmas to diamonds… that we also wish for at Christmas, have atoms are always arranged in a repeating three-dimensional lattice. However in a time crystal the atoms are different – the existence of which was first suggested in 2012 – repeat a pattern across the fourth dimension, time. This essentially means that they should oscillate forever without any external influence at all.

Professor Chetan Nayak, of University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote

“based on our current knowledge it had been natural to see if it was possible to spontaneously break the time-translational symmetry of the laws of physics”

But he said it was possible that the unusual flipping motion seen in the purported time crystals might not last forever.

Professor Nayak said

“Both groups present evidence of a time crystal but their combined results point to the need for experiments that truly show that the oscillations remain in phase over extended times and are not washed out by the inevitable fluctuations.”