Transcription
Hello wonderful person. This is Anton and it's about time we've discussed a very intriguing topic involving time crystals. A concept that was completely hypothetical for many years until in the last few years researchers actually started to produce them in the lab.
And while in early 2026, researchers actually had some other breakthroughs, including what you're seeing in this picture, a time crystal you can literally touch, hold, and interact with, along with another time crystal invention that could now be physically used in some of the technologies. And so in this video, we're going to discuss what these stem crystals are, why they potentially have a lot of use in future technologies, but we're going to start with how all of this began and why nobody actually knew they existed until 2012.
And so here we have to start with a kind of a major shift in how we understand the physics of time and matter. And that's because for an extremely long time, the word crystal was usually a word defining a certain physical pattern, normally involving atoms repeating in space, creating specific structures such as checkboards, but in three dimensions, with I guess the most common example being something like the crystal of water that of course creates ice. But in just the last few months, especially in 2026, researchers made some major breakthroughs that moved this concept from just being three-dimensional in space to a concept that's now four-dimensional in time as well, which is of course what a time crystal usually represents. And more importantly, it's not just a theoretical lab curiosity. Now, it's slow to slowly becoming a functional tool.
But it all starts with this guy a Nobel laureate Frank Wilchek who back in 2012 had a kind of a thought experiment or a kind of a revelation realizing that in theory nature should also consist of what's known as time crystals or essentially materials that don't just repeat and create patterns in space but they also do so in time.
Okay, let's try to imagine this in a slightly different way. Imagine a bunch of marbles or a bunch of rocks in a bowl of water. Eventually, they will settle at the bottom and eventually they will stop moving. These marbles have now reached their ground state or basically the lowest energy state possible. But if you want to move them again or if you want to basically have them produce any motion, you have to add energy. And so, for example, here you can, I guess, shake the bowl. But a time crystal is essentially a system where the particles in their lowest energy state actually still continuously move. And they don't just move, they move in a very repetitive, predictable pattern, returning back to the original spot once in a while. In other words, even when they have no external energy, they still continuously repeat the same thing. And they do so with a very predictable pattern.
In more scientific terms, they break the time translational symmetry. And though in normal physics, the laws of nature should look the same today as they do tomorrow, a time crystal essentially creates its own internal rhythm that's entirely different from the environment around it. In other words, for as long as nothing else affects it, it creates its own rules and it creates its own laws. But this is an important part. It's not some kind of a free energy machine or some kind of a perpetual motion machine. Here the system is already in its lowest energy state and so no work and no energy can be extracted from it. Instead it just keeps sticking even without any energy. Or at least that's what friend Will check proposed and what he believed we will eventually find.
But at first not everyone thought they could exist and was actually quite a lot of skepticism. As a matter of fact, some scientists argue that it should be impossible because they do resemble these perpetual motion machines with researchers believing that they should not exist in a thermal equilibrium and would only exist in very special conditions. But in 2016, there was a major breakthroughs. Researchers realized that time crystals could exist in special systems where there is some kind of a push. For example, in 2017, researchers created the first discrete time crystal using trapped ions and nitrogen inside diamonds. It was reported in the study. You can find any description. But in essence, here we had the first example of what seemed to be an actual physical time crystal. Even though this was a special case of a time crystal, it was a time crystal nevertheless.
But then every single year and sometimes even every single month, there was more and more breakthroughs. And by 2021 by using one of the quantum computers known as sycamore. Researchers even created one inside the computer. In this case, this was actually created by using 20 cubits and they were able to create something that was relatively stable and functioned just as predicted. Moreover, in 2021, scientists from University of Hamburg created a new version of a time crystal that was actually stabilized by its environment and did not dissipate. And in previous examples, the environment usually destroyed them. And so here even the environment itself was used to keep the isolations alive making the crystal more or less permanent.
But it was really last year and I think we actually discussed this in one of the videos in the description that researchers finally created a time crystal that was even visible to us as in they created something that was visible to our eyes and was not just mathematical and involved atoms. Although in this case it kind of resembled this. Now this was a temp crystal phenomenon but it was not an actual physical object you could touch. Once again, you can learn about this in one of the videos in the description. But now in 2026, less than a year later, we actually have a physical tank crystal that you can touch and I guess technically can even interact with and play with. And that's what you're looking at right here.
So, this was from February of 2026 and is based on this study from New York University where researchers created the classical time crystal using acoustic levitator and it's actually a surprisingly simple creation. It essentially just involves styrofoam beads. And in this case, these beads are suspended in midair using a very specific cushion created by acoustic waves or sound or to be more specific, an acoustic standing wave. And that's literally what you're seeing here. These are styrofoam balls levitating because of the acoustic wave. But here it is actually kind of exciting and kind of strange. First, it seems to defy Newton's third law. Now, in school, we're all taught that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. But because a lot of these beads are slightly different in size, they seem to scatter sound differently. And the larger beads in this case push the smaller beads harder than the small beads that push them back. And this seems to happen because a lot of the waves carry away the momentum causing the particles to recoil in a slightly different way. And so, yeah, it's not really violating any physical laws, but it does appear that way. And here this unbalanced force is actually referred to as non-rescrocal interaction. And because these forces are never balanced, a lot of these beads spontaneously start to dance and to oscillate in a somewhat repeating rhythm. Unfortunately, I couldn't really find any videos of this. But because this is so fast, you'll be basically invisible to our eyes. And so here there's a kind of an emerging rhythm. Because the speakers provide a constant sound wave here, the tick of this unusual time crystal seems to emerge naturally from the interaction of these slightly different beads. And in this case, it then starts to create this very repetitive pattern that seems to be unique to each of the beads. And here this directly shows us that time crystalline behavior is not just subatomic and does not just involve super cold conditions or quantum conditions. It seems to actually even become fundamental for physical particles or for objects we can interact with if you can create just the right environment. And so this is definitely one of the strangest and possibly one of the easiest to create time crystals that I think technically can even be created in some kind of a high school lab as a very simple demonstration.
But when it comes to practical use right now, I don't think there's really any. As a matter of fact, even the scientists in this case do not propose any physical use. I mean, in theory, we could use this as some kind of a precision timing device or to possibly use this as some kind of a very very precise environmental sensor. But at the moment, this is really just more of a demonstration than an actual practical proposition. Although some of the external commentaries do suggest that maybe this could be used to mimic various biological systems or biochemical networks or to even create self-organizing machines like micro robots that can use very similar techniques and very similar acoustic controllers to organize themselves because in this case we can predict exactly what patterns they'll form.
But even though this styrofoam discovery is not maybe very practical, this other one is. And this is based on a very different study from just a few weeks ago where researchers for the first time created something that's not just one-dimensional, but is actually two-dimensional. And specifically by using the IBM Heron R2 processor, they successfully created a two-dimensional discrete time crystal. This is one of the latest IBM quantum processors that allow them to create something that was previously believed to be way too complex. And here this is important for several reasons. First, the complexity. They were actually able to use 144 cubits arranged in a very specific way. Here, this is a massive scale compared to previous experiments. But more importantly, unlike previous models that used somewhat unusual couplings, the new study used what's referred to as the Heisenberg coupling, which actually mimics how real materials usually interact. Or just to rephrase this here, even though this is inside a quantum computer and is technically a simulation, it's a model that reflects real world physical systems very well. But more importantly, unlike other quantum simulations here, this crystal was remarkably stable and was not very sensitive to various types of noise and so it was able to persist much longer than previous attempts.
Now the actual study and the actual discovery is quite complex and involves a lot of quantum mechanic principles. But in a nutshell, they essentially were able to recreate a somewhat intriguing version of a two-dimensional time crystal that showcases something referred to as quantum utility or basically here the authors bridge the gap between theoretical toy models and a somewhat complex experimental realization of what you would call quantum matter. in essence allowing scientists to create more stable quantum systems that can persist much longer even in hotter conditions. And so here this confirms that tank crystals can be robust, can be stable, and can even contain several dimensions.
But more importantly, this is a very important application to this idea of quantum computing. In essence, this can actually help us overcome one of the biggest hurdles in modern quantum computing that has still not been overcome. and specifically cubits lose their information very very quickly. This is what we refer to as decoherence. But because time crystals are naturally stable and usually resist a lot of noise, they can be used in, for example, quantum memory to then allow data storage much much longer than before. In other words, for quantum researchers, this takes them just a little bit closer to finally realizing an actual working quantum computer. Now, we're still not there yet, but this particular experiment is somewhat important.
At the same time, as I mentioned, this also allows us to create super accurate clocks. And that's not just this particular experiment. Any time crystal, if we can create one that's very stable and that can function for a long time, can allow us to create the next generation of atomic locks where these very precise oscillations will allow us to keep track of time much, much better than before. And if you're not sure why this is important, check out one of the previous videos about timekeeping because our entire society today depends on the precision of clocks. We're talking about things like GPS, things like modern internet, and pretty much everything around us. Everything depends on these super accurate clocks.
At the same time, because of these patterns and because of the predictability of these time crystals, we can also use them to boost signals. As a matter of fact, it's already been proposed that we can actually use photonic time crystals to dramatically increase the amount of data that's sent from one place to another if we can create a time crystal that's very stable long-term. Now, right now, this only involved much smaller experiments, but that's essentially one of the potential practical propositions.
But that's actually why this concept is so exciting. At the moment, this went from just being a theory and a thought experiment into an actual physical experiment in just 14 years. But just like some other concepts, we're still not entirely sure how this could be used. It just scientists know that this is definitely something somewhat exciting because in many cases it literally does its own thing and ignores the environment around it. So once again here we have a material that oscillates with its own pattern regardless of what happens outside which basically now allows us to I guess in some sense crystallize time itself. And yeah, that's actually something that you would expect from science fiction. And so we're now moving away from just observing nature to building new phases of matter that don't even exist in the natural world and behave in an entirely different way from anything else. Which means that this is a pretty exciting time for a lot of quantum physics and a lot of theoretical physics as well. But until future discoveries about time crystals and that's pretty much all I wanted to mention. Thank you for watching. Subscribe. Come back tomorrow to learn something else. Support this channel on Patreon where you can find additional videos, videos without any ads and can DM me directly or by joining channel membership that grants you early access. You can also support this channel by buying the wonderful person t-shirt in the description below. Stay wonderful. I'll see you tomorrow and as always, bye-bye.