Time crystals

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

OK, I said I was just gonna post a fanfic here, and then skedaddle, thing is I periodically get sucked into the history/politics subforums and tend to just go way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaay out there. Regardless of whatever goes for those sayings of mine, saying them just gets me worked up, more than less, I'd say (haha!), so, no, let's not (quite) go there (for now).

So anyway, though, I don't want to hold this in, though, it's just way too cool.

Time crystals have been created.

Like, legit, 100%, this-is-what-they-are-frakkin'-called. Two different teams at two different universities (Harvard and of Maryland, I think) made them out of two different bases, or whatever. One used lasers and the other used microwaves, I believe. Generally, the stuff is not so much a totally new set of matter, just a new phase, sort of (I stress the "sort of") like how liquid and gas are phases of matter.

The most impressive aspect of them, in theory, is that they are in perpetual motion outside the thermodynamic order. That is, their motion is just a result of them having a 4-dimensional repeating shape, a space-time crystallographic function. From what I got out of the descriptions, converted to spatial geometry, a time crystal (for now) looks like a ring. But it's a ring of temporally aligned parts, like gelatin wiggling of itself or a particle circling a point without surcease or something.

Now, the super-impressive thing about all this is, to be sure, on the more speculative side, but I daresay the entire f&^king fact of these things calls some dimension of assumptions into serious question as it is, so anyway, point is, first off, these things could be used in quantum computing, possibly. More than that, though, because they're non-entropic, if a computer could be constructed out of them, it might be able to function even in a universal heat-death scenario.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

... thing is I periodically get sucked into the history/politics subforums and tend to just go way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaay out there. ...

Ya think?

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Ah, well, mostly just to be honest but also, therefore, as an indirect testament to my mental state, let's just say my hyper-conspiracy theory actually ended up even more extreme and fantastical than I had put it down on this site. I was able to suck in ideas about South Africa's self-cancellation of its nuclear weapons program and the ties between South Africa and the Netherlands, then the Netherlands and Abraham Kuyper, and so on, alongside all this stuff about the Methodists (and a city relevant to both them and to the Manhattan Project) and the Mormons (and radiation levels in St. George, Utah) and God knows what else. If nothing else it would make for a rather fun, liberal (I suppose) alternative to Left Behind, a sort of balance between those books and the RCC dude's Elijah novels (if you've heard of Michael O'Brien). Of course, please forgive me haha, IIRC I posed a semirhetorical question about the destruction of physical reality, too, which actually is Biblical, I will say (as in the passage about everything dissolving by the last fire into its elements), and in my own mind I followed up this question to no end. Like, I started trying to figure out if the government (any government) had or seemed on the verge of having a form of technology that could pretty much literally, possibly, destroy not just major cities or even most of the surface life on Earth, but the entire known universe. So like any good schizophrenic I hooked onto the fact that Calvin was the "pope of Geneva," so to speak, back in the day, with Geneva being where CERN is, so... what if some Calvinists decided to overpower CERN to try to trigger a false vacuum collapse (one of the conjectured risks of the device, if with a vanishingly small chance of happening)? Then I started listening to all this Latinesque music from video games like Final Fantasy 7 and Resident Evil 4 and visualizing large numbers of nuclear missiles being fired in a pillar sequence over a particle accelerator being driven to a dangerous high-energy event, so that the pillar of nuclear force would intersect the particle collision and intensify the event even more. And so on and on, finally I gave up, thinking, the logistics of a cosmic apocalypse are too obscure for me to compute under the circumstances (though Greg Bear gave me some ideas ). Now who knows, of course, maybe time crystals are gonna be used as weapons haha.

I suppose saying all that does my... credibility? no good. However, it would be pointless for me to pretend that incredible beliefs, hidden from interpersonal argument, would not detract from whatever else I would say anyway. Like, even if I never posted all that stuff, it would have been true that I believed it and so when I posted anything else, I would be doing so with that all in mind.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I do want to add a little argument in my defense, however. As I to a slight extent noted, I did have some personal exchange of a negative form with a member of the group I expressed so much concern over. However, that was not, in fact, the limit of my personal interaction with the elements of the scenario in question. On the contrary, I had spent something like a decade+ working on the question, and ones related to it. I even had a family motive in that my dad was/is a nuclear engineer for the Navy/a local shipyard, not like he designs stuff but just does maintenance on it (to my knowledge), but still, it always kinda irked me, like why is he working for not just the government, but for this part of the military dimension of the government? Doesn't he know that's wrong, I would judge of him in my mind. (Supposedly, and keep in mind the supposedly, the local naval base tied to the shipyard serves as a site for at least some submarines with Trident missiles.) And so I had a St. Francis of Assisi moment inside, thinking "on this day I can truly say 'my Father in heaven'," deciding, well, I will go ahead and devote my life to stopping nuclear weapons, like I will specifically obsess over them and so on and on.

So last year, in the middle of the year, I went to a concert in Chicago. It was for my favorite band, the one that for most of my time with this forum I've mentioned in my "location" sidebar slot. This was even the third of the concerts I've ever been to, so two of them for this one band. It was a frustrating ordeal involving taking buses all the way to and from Illinois. But the way it all played out sealed the episode very powerfully inside me, so much so that, given the way my thoughts flow, I became fixated on Chicago, on the idea that I had to go back there for some reason eventually, and so on and on.

As a result of all this, when the time came for me to believe that the world is ending, I sealed Chicago in my judgments as a city that would be especially endangered, now. Like, just for my own sake I thought that. (And when I say "my own sake" I mean, this judgment didn't even depend purely on the concert but on the fact that in the fantasy novels in the Word-and-the-Void trilogy by a local author, there is this exchange between Seattle and Illinois, with Seattle being across the sound from where I live. This and that a specific friend of mine lived there, and because I went to see LOTR:ROTK in theaters, during the one month here in the US in 2011 that they released it again, on the same night that I went to see Transformers 3 of all things (:P)) which just happened to feature a massive attack on Chicago---which would be entirely non sequiter even for me if it weren't for my absurd romantic idealism about a guy I knew at the time and who I'd staged this elaborate scenario with revolving around going to see ROTK.)

But then presto, just when I assumed I couldn't sound any more ridiculous, even to myself, the current government decided to announce some possible deployment of "the Feds" (whatever that means) to Chicago, to quell unrest or disorder or strife or whatever there, a claim that surprised me since whenever I'm in Seattle I see hear or see sirens far off or nearby or wherever but for all the day I was in Chicago I saw not even an ambulance clearly, while I was wandering around a major hospital area for hours.

EDIT: One thing I managed to avoid, though, was a persecution psychosis. This did come at me in waves but I deflected it mostly by thinking that if it were true, it would be useless for me to know whatever I thought I knew. So instead I just assumed that I'm too poor and socially isolated for the government or any such thing to want to go out of its way to persecute me. I could imagine my fanatical coworker stalking me on the side, so to speak, but he's not in the government.

EDIT 2: Also, I am not saying that the media/government are lying or otherwise misinforming people about the level of violent crime in Chicago. The day I was there was, to be sure, but a single day, and an unseasonable one at that. A pedestrian actually told me that the city had basically been in a min-heat wave or something and it just so happened that on this day when the concert festival began (it was for more than the one band and went on for three days) the wind came in and clouds, without rain, decked the sky. So all around a nonstandard day for the city, for that time of the year, so as unlikely as it may seem, the lack of any tangible evidence of a major crime wave in Chicago, then, is not evidence of an absence of this wave.

EDIT 3: Oh, yeah, do have one more confession to make... So, uh, yeah, I even ended up making... a diagram. Like I got a big piece of sketch paper and started penning all these symbols and code phrases with weird arrows connecting them on a timeline going back to the Trojan legends and the foundations of Jerusalem, to Dante's time period to Immanuel Kant to the Vietnam War. I guess in my defense, I felt daunted when I got into it enough, like, wtf am I doing?! So I backed off, put the sketch pad away and all. Didn't ever tell anyone who saw it, that I didn't mean it, though.

[Avatar]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6025 ... e-crystal/

--A