Time Crystals

[Brian]

http://phys.org/news/2016-09-crystals.html

[Marblehead]

I should try to gain some knowledge of crystals.  Might be an interesting mind game to play.

[Karl]

It sounds amazing but it's way over my head. Too much distance between the mulch and the leaves. I'm about all done at crystal oscillators, vibrating quartz, resonance and basic harmonics. Adding time to crystal just messes with my head. I'm used to measuring relative time with crystal, that a crystal is somehow time in itself is a bit like Platos 'crystalness'.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Thanks Brian, an interesting read.  This in particular:
 

To show that such a system can indeed exhibit motion, Wilczek and Shapere performed some complex mathematical calculations, which revealed that a system in its lowest energy state could move in a periodic motion, such as a loop or orbit.  (Time crystals could behave almost like perpetual motion machines, Paragraph Four, Emphasis mine, ZYD)

hearkens back to what I said here:
 

Aether would be closer to the Buddhist element of space/void, or the Hindu element of Akasha: While Aether has a long pre-history in Greek, the use of Aether as “fifth” element is specifically Aristotelian, and has to do with his theory of natural motion and in particular the natural motion of the “celestial spheres” which was a circular motion, so that the notion of circular motion is essential to the definition of Aether from Hellenistic times through the Nineteenth Century, where it survived because of such demonstrations of a naturally occurring circular motion that arises in magnetic and optical experiments, as the “ether” through which Maxwell's electromagnetic waves were supposed to propagate. This circular motion was discovered by the great experimental physicist Michael Faraday and first demonstrated in his:

Faraday's Homopolar motor

The Faraday Effect

 
about circular motion being the "natural motion" of the aether.   In modern physics' terminology "the ground state", is the equivalent of natural motion, because it is the point at which a system has found its "natural place".  This can be compared to the natural motion of a rock, which "falls" because it is seeking its natural place, or ground state, which in this case is quite literally, on the ground.

 

The notion of circular motion as being a "ground state" of a system is very interesting indeed.