What the hell's the deal with these Time Crystals?

[Shroom Man 777]

Seriously, someone explain this to me. It's all over the news but it sounds like bad reportage.

[Iroscato]

In my deeply laymanesque understanding, they oscilate at a certain frequency without any external influence forever, repeating their pattern within the fourth dimension, time. Apparently this goes against many expectations of physicists.

Doubtless someone else here could explain better than I, but I highly doubt it's the secret to unlocking time travel as Buzzfeed or what have you are making it out to be.

[Zixinus]

Here is a link about the subject.

Basically another, weird exotic state of matter in crystals that do not have a set rest state at its lowest energy state but keeps in motion (and it may or may not be a perpetual motion machine although not one you could gain energy from). Kind of like a superconductor forever conducting electricity, I think? If it is confusing, theoretically it should not have existed but it does. It seems to be a bit confusing.

[Lord Revan]

Theories can and have been adjusted to fit facts, it's nothing new.

Though one must remember that especially if it's in a mainstream news source (opposed to science magazine or similar) the article will probably be 99% hype and 1% fact and if you look into it not nowhere close to as special as the initial news stories suggest. Kind of like how reports of possible single-call organisms in Mars got reported like an alien spacecrafted landed on the White House lawn, sure technically a possible extra-terrasial lifeform was discovered but it's nowhere close to the hype and I think it turned out to contamination from Earth on the Instruments.

Basically everytime mainstream media reports about some huge new scientific discovery, take it with a truck load of salt.

[Shroom Man 777]

The Gizmodo article says that these fluctuations or oscillations require external energy input...

[Simon_Jester]

That is entirely possible.

Anyway, what's interesting about these things is that they bounce around but always come back to the same state on a microscopic level. Which is unusual compare to, say, atoms bouncing around in normal material.