TIme Crystals

What is a crystal? The wikipedia definition begins with this sentence:

A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly, repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions.

We've talked before in this blog about physicist Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, who has some interesting ideas about the nature of time which can be tied to this project. Last month Dr. Wilczek, along with Alfred Shapere of the University of Kentucky published a paper at arxiv.org with the fascinating title of "Classical Time Crystals". That same day, Dr. Wilczek published a related paper, called "Quantum Time Crystals". Please follow the links if you'd like to get into the nitty gritty of what these scientists are proposing. Or check out this informative article written by Lisa Zyga and published February 20, 2012 at physorg.com: "Time crystals could behave almost like perpetual motion machines".

Wait, perpetual motion? That's impossible, right? We've talked a few times lately about the suspicions held by some that free energy technologies already exist and have been deliberately and maliciously suppressed by powers-that-be. Could time crystals be another path to this ideal? A time crystal would be a structure which exhibits a continuously repeating motion across time even in its lowest energy state. Lisa Zyga's article says Shapere and Wilczek suggest that even if time crystals don't exist in nature, it should be possible to construct them:

“It’s so tricky to implement mathematically,” Wilczek told PhysOrg.com. “It’s surprising that they can exist at all. But, whether or not they exist naturally, I’m very optimistic that it’s something one could engineer.”

But let's not jump to the wrong conclusion here: Wilczek is not promising a new free energy source or a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. As the article reports:

He added that, even though time crystals might move continuously, they couldn’t be used to generate useful energy since they can’t be disturbed, and they wouldn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Back in Bees and Tangential Thinking, we discussed this quote from Stephen Hawking:

I still believe the universe has a beginning in real time, at the big bang. But there's another kind of time, imaginary time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end.

And as I said in that previous blog entry: what is Hawking's "imaginary time"? It seems clear to me that if it's at right angles to our 4D spacetime, then it must be the fifth dimension. While I understand his use of "time" and "imaginary time" to convey these fourth- and fifth-dimensional ideas to the public, they do have the potential to create some confusion. Calling the fourth dimension "duration" rather than time, and the fifth dimension our "probability space" has been my suggestion for making these concepts more clear.

What I love about this new idea of "time crystals" is that it encourages us to think about time as just another spatial dimension, which could have repeating structures within it that occur naturally, or that can be constructed. Like Hawking, Wilczek also invokes "imaginary time", but he gives us a modern spin on this idea: he calls imaginary time "iTime".

In nature, fractals and fibonacci sequences and even DNA could be thought of the same way: as repeating structures which have a larger function that exists not just within space-time, but as waves and repeating patterns that exist outside of space-time. Extending these ideas of extra-dimensional patterns beyond the fourth dimension to explain much else about our reality has been one of the main goals of this project.

Is life itself like a time crystal? In entries like Beer and Miracles, we've looked at some astonishing implications of how yeast cells have been shown to be able to lie dormant for 45 million years and still spring back to life when the proper conditions are presented. What was within those cells during that huge time period that could be called "alive"? This is one of the great mysteries of the universe, and I believe Frank Wilczek is providing us with new and important implications about how that "tiny spark of life" that we've talked about so often with this project really could be something that forms naturally within the underlying extra-dimensional structures of our reality: like a crystal, the repeating pattern that engages with space-time to allow life to occur at any place within the universe could be a highly ordered extra-dimensional structure, a time crystal from the "iTime" of the fifth dimension. How cool is that?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: New Video - Wrapping it Up Part One