>>12816024I was so confused about your pendulum explanation but I googled infite time crystal energy and I found this article which explained it pretty well.
While we have a lot of examples of repeated patterns in nature, time crystals are different beasts for two important reasons. For one, they are a stable pattern — the system is in its lowest possible energy state, which means that in principle, they can keep oscillating forever.
This sounds suspiciously like a perpetual-motion machine — hence all the buzz.
>That, and the fact that they violate the law of conservation of energy.I knew it, I'm such a fucking pleb.
Let's say you were to perform a physics experiment, haul your apparatus to a new location, repeat the experiment, and get the exact same result. Congratulations, you've identified a symmetry in space. And by Noether's Theorem, the law of conservation of momentum is obeyed in that situation.
For every such symmetry you can find, there is an associated conservation law. If you can rotate your experiment around and get the same results, you get conservation of angular momentum. Wait a few minutes and repeat? Conservation of energy. Hunts for these fundamental symmetries form the basis for … well, all of modern physics.
Empty space is perfectly symmetrical — moving objects inside it act as you would expect by obeying the usual momentum conservation laws. A normal crystal breaks spatial symmetry: There are spots on the crystal that look different than other spots (such as the edge of the object — otherwise there wouldn't be a crystal, would there?). And guess what: Conservation of momentum is not always obeyed inside a crystal. Two vibrations traveling in the same direction can intersect and combine, and the resulting wave can travel in the perfectly opposite direction.
This is called "umklapp" scattering, from the German for "flipped-over," and is now your official word of the day.
