You’re a writer, or at least flopping the idea around in your head. No lie: That’s absolutely fantastic. We want you to write for us. More importantly, we want to pay you $100 to do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re Michael Crichton or the new kid on the block, Listverse thrives on the words of people just like you. If you’ve already written a top 10 list, great! Skip this whole thing and head right over to our submission page.

Not quite ready yet? Don’t worry: We want to help you. First of all, bookmark our author guide for later. You’ll want to read that thing through with a magnifying glass, because that’s seriously exactly what will get your list published. But while that’ll get you the whole way, sometimes it helps to have a few stepping stones to ease the journey. From one writer to another, here’s my process for writing for Listverse.

10Get An Idea

Easy! Oh, wait, not so much? I’ll be honest: This is usually the hardest part of the entire writing process. You’d think that with so many weird and bizarre things happening all the time all over the world, it would be easier to come up with one skinny little bare-bones idea for a top 10 list. Especially if you’re making a cool tenth of a grand doing it. But hey, it’s not that easy to find that ticket to the Listverse front page.

So stop trying to find one. Wait—hear me out. Instead of forcing yourself to find an idea, go about your daily life. Browse the same sites, read the same books, watch the same shows. But stick a little hitchhiker in the far left corner of your brain that looks at everything and says, “Hey, that could make a great list.” And if you’re still dead in the water, branch out a little. Interested in science? Check out LiveScience, NatGeo, or Phys.org. Unsolved murders? The New Yorker, Harper’s, and NPR run some amazingly in-depth pieces on murders and cold cases. Strange history? How about the DC poison squad or Smithsonian‘s bizarre timeline of the Ouija board?

The nuggets of ideas are out there, and they’re waiting for you to come along and snag them. For example, all those links up there? None of those stories have been covered by Listverse yet.

9Stick A Theme On It

We love lists that tightly orbit a central idea. Most of the time, that theme is going to end up being your list’s title, or at least the gist of it. It doesn’t need to be earth-shattering, but it should make the ground tremble. After all, that’s the first thing readers will see on the site. Each entry is also going to tie into that main theme, which is why it’s so important to figure it out before you run off to find your list’s entries.

Really want to guarantee that your list will be accepted, not just by us, but by our readers as well? Here’s a tip: Take your idea, and twist it. Instead of writing 10 Unsolved Murders, show us something like Robin Warder’s 10 Mysterious Disappearances With Bizarre Clues. Instead of just talking about Abraham Lincoln, give us 10 Reasons Lincoln Was Secretly A Terrible President. Surprise us by making us look at something in a new and unexpected way.

Don’t worry about the actual title yet—just get that general theme going, because it’s going to make researching your list a lot easier. The tighter your theme, the better.

8Research The Dickens Out Of It

You’ve got a powerful starting idea and a twisted theme that’ll have Listverse readers tearing their hair out with slack-jawed amazement. Now what? The Internet is a vast sea of treacherous knowledge eager to suck you into its depths for eternity, and finding your specific entries is akin to throwing a rock in the air and hoping it hits the Moon.

That’s why you have a theme. Think of it as your anchor to the shore when you’re searching for new entries.

One thing you can do to make successive lists easier is make your own database of useful sites. I tend to gravitate toward science-based lists, so I have Wired, LiveScience, Phys.org, MNN, and NASA bookmarked for easy reference, to name a few. If I want to write a list on, say, insect zombies, I can search for crazy examples through those sites directly rather than wading through a quagmire of Google results.

If you like to write about creepy urban legends, bookmark sites in that vein. Politics? Go for the big names: CNN, BBC, New York Times, The Guardian. Google Books is an awesome search tool for historical lists. Even the vast Internet sea has its crannies of specialized life.

One thing to remember when you’re researching is that you have to provide sources for your information, so save the links to every site you use. We don’t take Wikipedia or tabloid-esque sites like The Daily Mail or The Metro as sources. If you use Wikipedia to start your research (which is fine), make sure you can find the same information presented in a different source. You can find more info on acceptable sources in the author guide.

Research can make or break a great list, and it’s not uncommon to find a ton of entries and then realize that the list as a whole won’t work. (If this happens to you, read on a bit farther.) Don’t let it discourage you.

7Get Your Outline Going

When you research, the easiest way to manage everything is to keep a Word document open to paste quick entry titles and their corresponding links. As you go along, the skeleton of a list is going to form on that page. My outlines usually look something like this. It’s incomplete and a little muddled, but that gives me the bare-bones idea for each entry. If I get more than 10, I can whittle them from that list until I have the best options. Alternatively, if I start finding that my entries are veering toward a different focal point, I can split them into two separate lists right there, then choose the one I like best later.

How you set it up is entirely up to you, of course, but if you’re just easing into the idea of writing for Listverse, an outline like that is a solid starting point for organizing your thoughts. It may be a little more work at the beginning, but that white lady isn’t going to come home on her own. Guide her in gently.

And hey, when you stumble across a potential entry idea, run a quick search on Listverse to make sure we haven’t covered it already. (For future reference, the search tool is the little magnifying glass on the top-right corner of this page; you can also use your Google-fu to search only on Listverse.) We probably won’t want to cover a story again unless we’re bringing a significant amount of new information to the table. It’s a quick extra step that’ll save you the hassle of rewriting an entry if it turns out the idea has been featured on the site before.

6Write An Entry

Yep, just one. Don’t worry about the other nine. They’re off having lunch; they’ll be back later. Right now it’s just you and a keyboard and 150 words and all that research you just did. Pick one entry you really like from your outline—maybe that first one, the idea that got you rolling on your list—and tell us about it. Lead into it with the most important fact, the one that defines the entry.

Specifics? Okay, maybe you’re writing a list about 10 people who shouldn’t be alive, and maybe you take that story about that woman who made a cup of tea after taking a .38-caliber bullet through the skull. Maybe, just maybe, the entry starts like this:

With her dead husband on the floor and blood streaming from two bullet holes in her head, Tammy Sexton needed something to take the edge off. So she brewed a hot cup of tea, then sat down to wait for the police.

Right off the bat, you’re giving readers something to sink their teeth into, and from there you can expand on the details of the story. Before you know it, you’ve written a whole entry. Then do it again, and again, and each time it’ll be a little easier because you’re that much closer to finishing the list. It’s all too easy to look at a list as a whole and think, “Whoa, no way I can write all of that,” and if you’re lazy and easily distracted like me, you never will. So trick your brain by taking it one entry at a time.

And hey, want to use that example above? It’s free, so see if you can build a unique and intriguing list around it and send it on in.

5Some Basic Rules

Every day we receive around 100 submissions and while many of them are excellent, a few don’t quite pass muster. Here are the main reasons we don’t accept a list:

1. The English is not quite up to standard (or is downright non-existent). This is the main reason we reject lists. We don’t expect you to be an English professor but we do expect you to be able to write English like a native speaker. More than 70 percent of the lists we reject every day are rejected for this reason.

2. We (or other websites) have already covered the topic. The best submissions are original. They are not re-workings of our old lists or content from other sites.

3. The topic is way off-base for us. Every day we receive lists on why you should become a vegan (hint: you shouldn’t!), how to improve your mental health by doing yoga, the writer’s favorite ten shirts in their wardrobe, the best tourist destinations in Smalltown (population 5), etc. I probably don’t need to expand on why these lists are not for us.

4No Funny Business

You’re a funny guy or gal. I can tell already. But keep in mind that Listverse wants facts, not comedy. There’s a fine line between being original and shoehorning in a joke just for laughs. Some humor is important because it keeps the writing from getting too dry, but the first order of business is always presenting your information in a clear, easy-to-understand way. That’s what our readers expect from us, and we try every day to make sure it happens.

If you absolutely, die-if-you-won’t, have to add humor to your list, find a way to present the information itself in a humorous way, rather than using extra lines purely for the sake of having a joke in there. I’m guilty of some terrible jokes myself, and take it from me: What sounds hilarious in your head usually just makes you cringe when you see it online later. For example, this list about condoms has some great examples of Listverse humor done right. It’s subtle and the double entendres give you the kind of straight-faced inner chuckle that would make Harrison Ford proud. In the end, we want readers to leave remembering the knowledge, not the jokes. A good rule of thumb for jokes is if you’re not sure about it, go ahead and leave it out.

3Proofread Everything

Your list doesn’t have to be perfect, and we don’t expect anyone to Vonnegut their paragraphs around here. In fact, very, very few lists are fit for publishing right out of the acceptance gates. We do have editors, and they’re actually pretty good at what they do, but that list is going to get out on the site a lot faster if it comes in cleanly. It’s incredible what you’ll pick up after just reading through your list once after you finish it.

Misspellings, repeated words, all the little things spellchecker switched around behind your back like the scheming bastard it is—most of these simple mistakes will leap out at you the first time you read them. If they don’t leap out at you and there aren’t too many, the editors will grab them, but the whole process works best if we all work together like a team.

Besides, don’t you want to be proud of your work as a writer? Because if you followed all these steps, that’s what you are now: A bonafide professional writer. Trundle on over to the Listverse submission page to send us your words. And don’t forget to fill in the field marked “Paypal or Bitcoin Address;” that’s how we pay you.

Now take a deep breath . . . and keep doing that forever, because that’s how you’re alive. Alive as a writer, you dog, you.

2Hit The Listverse Forum

You’ve done it. You’ve written, submitted, and published a list on the front page of Listverse. Your pocket’s burning with that hot Benjamin we Paypalled straight into your account, and the world is a shimmering oyster through which your newly awakened writerly eyes can see all the layers of possibility that make up reality. Sugar never tasted so good.

So, erm, now what?

Well if you want, hop right back on that horse and write another list. There’s no limit to how much our writers are allowed to write, and no limit to how much you can make doing it. If you felt an unmistakeable tingle of exhilaration discovering that first list, you’re definitely in the right place. The tingle never dies.

Once you’ve published your first list with us, you also get an email with access to the Listverse forum. This is where writers and editors hang out together, toss around ideas, and get to know each other. It’s magical, and it’s filled with helpful writers just like yourself who understand the trials and pitfalls of list-writing. Nobody’s going to downtalk you there or call your ideas stupid; we’re all in the same boat, floating down the same river.

Even better, there’s a section of the forum that we call World of Ideas. If an editor or a writer finds a super cool tidbit but doesn’t have time to do anything with it, they’ll drop it in there for anyone to claim. It’s like an idea factory. We also have an optional place to pitch ideas to Micah, our Head Honcho of Words. He’s nicer than he sounds, and he’ll give you real-life, personalized feedback on your own ideas, and either a green light to write it or some feedback on why it didn’t work.

You can also follow our Facebook page and Twitter account to see your list broadcast to 150,000 people, which is an awesome sight all on its own. Sort of like seeing a whale breaching in an avalanche.

1Forget All My Advice

In the end, you’re the writer. Even though we want you to stick to a few basic rules, we also want you to bring your unique voice and angle to your list. That’s what makes Listverse so diverse: the many talented writers we work with. We wouldn’t be able to publish new and interesting lists every day if we didn’t have creative ideas coming in from creative people.

What I’ve just outlined for you is my personal process. It’s a good launching point, but now I want you to take those pieces, let them tumble around in your head, and then stack them into something new and beautiful. I’m just one little guy who writes here; get an idea of the process from me, sure, but don’t make it canon. Everything I’ve just said can be changed to suit you.

Can’t get into doing an outline? That’s fine—just figure out one entry at a time and let your list evolve from there. Write as you research each point, if you want. The idea is to find a method that works for you, and only you will be able to figure out what that is.

For more tips on writing for us from another seasoned author, Morris M., check out his list on 10 Tips for Getting Paid to Write for Listverse.

Most of us saw the headlines in July of 2021 about Google creating a time crystal in a quantum computer and how this could possibly be the greatest breakthrough in physics to date. Some of us actually attempted to read these news stories. Of course, they were real cool with their claims of breaking the laws of thermodynamics and pending warp drive technology, at least up until we encountered perplexing words such as qubits, eigenstate, and periodicity (sending most of us back to Instagram).

However, this is fascinating stuff, but the science behind it is incredibly advanced and largely still theoretical. So much so that many scientists themselves cannot fully understand what makes a time crystal tick. Sometimes, though, when you break an esoteric topic down and examine it in segments, the entire concept slowly becomes clearer. So let’s give it a try…

Related: 10 Absolutely Freaky Strange Substances Discovered By Science

10 A Physicist with a Dream and a Catchy Phrase

First introduced in 2012 by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, Professor of Physics at MIT, time crystals were proposed as a theoretical phase of matter which would display temporal periodicity. Items with periodicity have qualities that recur at intervals, and crystals (think snowflakes) have patterns that repeat in the 3D world, an example of periodicity in space. Wilczek theorized that, through the use of condensed matter devices capable of observing incredibly small things, he could detect patterns in particles that likewise repeat in the dimension of time. (At this point, most people are already confused, so if that’s how you feel, you’re right where you should be.)

When liquids freeze, the molecules within draw closer to each other in a stable arrangement known as their lowest energy state. Thus water droplets in the sky turn to snowflakes when the temp drops, the hydrogen and oxygen molecules reaching out and forming a hexagonal, crystalline structure for reasons not entirely understood. This is an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking—a term that can be confusing as part of the beauty of a snowflake crystal is the symmetry of the six arms or branches forming its structure. How then might it be breaking symmetry? What gives?

Water has a certain symmetry in that it looks and feels the same all throughout; the molecules are arranged consistently. But as a snowflake forms, its molecular structure feels compelled to break that symmetry by forming six branches from a central prism. Wilczek proposed that during a quantum-mechanical system’s lowest energy state, known as time translational symmetry, might also be broken in the generally intangible 4th dimension. Thus, this would produce an observable time crystal, similar to how snowflakes and other 3D crystals (quartz, diamonds, etc.) break spatial translational symmetry.

If all of this sounds like convoluted poppycock, join the academic club. Wilczek’s colleagues had a hard time understanding the concept in its entirety. They discredited his working model, and though his research inspired further debate, they felt he was barking up the wrong side of a very obscure tree. But there was something about that term—time crystal—that seemed to perk up many a collegiate conversation. The name just sounded much too cool not to get repeated within the confines of university lunchrooms, right along with terms such as “black hole,” “dark matter,” and “Comic-Con.” This interest helped keep Wilczek’s theory under ongoing discussion.^[1]

A good campaign always starts with a strong slogan…

9 Setting Down Some Ground Rules

During the first four years after Wilczek’s paper was published, not only was his working model discounted, but the entire concept of time crystals was also declared absolutely impossible by researchers at both the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, and the University of Tokyo. Of course, almost immediately following those negative declarations, other researchers started looking for exceptions to the established rule that might just work after all.

The concept of discrete time crystals spread throughout the world of quantum physics—the word “discrete” denoting a distinct form of symmetry breaking away from the backdrop of a continuous symmetry. Snowflakes are, again, a good example of this. As they form in the cold air, the delicate branches that grow have a symmetry all their own, distinct by contrast to the smoothness of liquid water.

Discrete time crystals were thus theorized to have the capability of breaking time translational symmetry, at least when being zapped by a laser or other driving force. And such particles should attain a spin periodicity all their own that repeats in multiples of the periodicity of that driving force. Sound confusing yet? Even to fellow physicists, this gets quite confusing to the point that it makes Newtonian physics seem like an easy read. So to better understand discrete time crystals, a couple of ground rules had to be established:

The first criterion states that the crystal must be robust, which basically means it must be strong enough to maintain its current state despite external fluctuations within a specific range—much like a snowflake crystal remains in its current physical state despite minor temperature changes that might occur below 0°C (32°F). Likewise, a true time crystal holds its own in the wilderness of quantum disruption.

The second rule demands that a discrete time crystal must be immune to the thermal energy of the drive inducing its current quantum state. Basically, it’s not allowed to heat up. The way to do that is through what’s known as many-body localization, or MBL, which provides just enough disorder within the system to allow destructive interference or the act of opposing waves canceling each other out. This keeps the crystal from growing hot and losing stability.^[2]

So…with the concept of time crystals significantly revamped, it was time to give it all another try. And there were plenty of eager scientists ready to take that challenge!

8 Approaching Time Crystals from a Different Angle

In 2016, two very important experiments were conducted using this new concept. First, the University of Maryland’s Dr. Christopher Monroe claimed success in creating the very first glimpse of a discrete time crystal. Monroe’s team trapped a chain of ytterbium-171 ions within radio-frequency electromagnetic fields, manipulating and observing their spin states as they pummeled the little guys with lasers.

This caused them to oscillate with an integer multiple of the periodicity of the drive—a dance all their own and a sure sign that a discrete time crystal had been achieved. A good visual for this phenomenon might be a serving of Jell-O jiggling with a frequency all its own, despite how you might wiggle the plate to the contrary. The time crystal developed a stable and robust subharmonic oscillation which held true even when otherwise perturbed and poked, up until its frequency grew too strong to maintain, causing it to “melt” on a quantum level.

That same year, over at Harvard, a team led by Professor Mikhail Lukin had similar results using a diamond flawed with nitrogen-vacancy centers (a common impurity). However, they utilized a microwave drive rather than a laser to induce coupled electron spins. Time crystals have also been defined theoretically or detected by observation in several other separate experiments. Researchers have even found hints of them occurring naturally within the monoammonium phosphate crystals commonly grown by kids in science class.

But these experiments and conclusions were met with skepticism despite their claims of success. Many scientists decided they needed a better method of confirming the existence of time crystals. Thus they turned to another novelty in the field of higher physics, quantum computing, to better understand breaking the symmetry of time.^[3]

7 What’s So Special About Time?

Before we can fully understand time crystals or the fascination scientists have with them, we first need to understand how elusive and intangible the so-called 4th dimension actually is, despite the fact we literally exist in and travel through it each and every moment of our lives. Physicists have a hard time grasping the flow of time—both literally and figuratively. As long as the numbers on the blackboard add up, they just take it for granted like anyone else. However, many of them question time’s standing as an actual dimension, as it certainly doesn’t act at all like the first three. A person can stand motionless within the 3D world of ours (at least relative to the ground beneath his feet), but just try standing motionless in time. Many people have tried; all have failed.

Back in the 4th century, the philosopher Aristotle tried his best to understand time. He took a grim note on the subject when he wrote, “Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.” This seems to be a very early commentary on the topic of entropy. And thirteen centuries later, physicist/astronomer Sir Isaac Newton theorized that “absolute time” is only evident in mathematics. What we as humans perceive is “relative time,” measurable by the movement of objects such as the sun or the moon.

Of course, Albert Einstein popularized the concept of spacetime in his theory of relativity, tying the three spatial dimensions and time into a four-dimensional manifold. He also described how gravity could curve time, a theory that holds true as evidenced by our GPS satellites. At the altitude of 20,200 kilometers (10,900 nautical miles), gravity is four times weaker. Therefore, the clocks in space run 45 microseconds faster each day than clocks on Earth. This is offset by another law of relativity which states that clocks moving very fast run slower than stationary ones, accounting for those same satellite clocks to run seven microseconds slower. After taking both factors into account, they run about 38 millionths of a second faster each day than the clocks down here. If not for computerized compensation, this small disparity would result in GPS malfunction in just two minutes.^[4]

So fine—the math on the blackboard all adds up, and we know how to use it, but how do we actually touch time? How can we step aside from it to better examine it? How can we touch it or even feel it other than through the fleeting and ephemeral sense of “now”? Well, in Stuttgart, Germany, scientists might have actually caught visual evidence of time on video!

6 Caught Carousing on Camera

Well, 2021 was certainly a busy and enterprising year in the development of time crystals. As a matter of fact, in February, one of them was actually captured on video at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart. A German-Polish team of researchers nuked a magnetic strip with a microwave field to create an oscillating micrometer-sized time crystal from magnons orderly arranged in a row. Magnons are quasiparticles (if that helps any). They danced back and forth in perfect rhythm, disappearing and reappearing in their own quantum choreography.

The crystal also welcomed other magnons into the club when they were introduced. In unison, they skipped back and forth with precise periodicity between two separate physical states. The creation of this time crystal was significantly groundbreaking, and the video, taken with an X-ray microscope, is astounding once you know exactly what you’re watching. The crystal was also unique in its relatively large size and that it existed at room temperature (and not in a super-cooled environment). Its conception also suggests that time crystals are both more widespread and robust than initially thought.

But that wasn’t the only contribution in the study of time crystals from the Max Planck Society in 2021. The director of their Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dr. Roderich Moessner, was part of the team of university physicists working with Google to build the first time crystal with a quantum computer. And really, one could hardly find a more fitting venue with which to cook one of the little quantum buggers up.^[5]

5 What Exactly Is a Quantum Computer?

Many people confuse quantum computing with supercomputers, which are really just mainframes with ultra-powerful performance. While classical, or binary, computing relies on bits to store information in values of either 0 or 1, quantum computers rely on qubits (quantum bits). These can represent the values of 0, 1, or both simultaneously in a state called superposition, up until an outcome is determined. Interaction between two or more qubits is called entanglement. When information is stored in superposition, computations run exponentially faster per number of qubits.

So, what are qubits made of? Well…you can’t exactly buy them at Best Buy. Google’s highly publicized Sycamore processor quantum computer held 54 superconducting transom qubits (only 53 of which were functional) made of aluminum plates about 100 microns across, the width of several hairs. We are truly talking information processing on an infinitesimal scale. And what does the actual gizmo look like?

The Sycamore is an elaborate cluster of lights and filaments surrounded by swarms of braided wire, all hanging upside down within the confines of a cryostat, as extremely low temps are needed to keep the qubits working correctly on a quantum level. This is all contained within a casing resembling a giant tin can, with peripheral controls and equipment filling an entire room. As a result, Google’s Sycamore will never run the risk of being confused with one of their much more totable Chromebooks.

Not all quantum computers look alike, as many different companies make them, and they’re built with specific projects in mind. However, they’re capable of amazingly fast deduction. In October 2019, Google claimed “quantum supremacy” over supercomputers when their Sycamore solved a random number problem in 3 minutes and 20 seconds—a feat that would have taken the IBM Summit about 10,000 years. In response, IBM quickly fashioned an algorithm that significantly narrowed the gap. Still, the Sycamore took the prize. But watch out Google, for IBM is planning to build a quantum computer with a 1121-qubit Condor chip by 2023. And both companies have plans to build processors with 1 million qubits by 2030, which would make the Sycamore, with 54 qubits (1 broken), seem as antiquated as a dial-up internet connection.

But how do these things think? Quantum computers deal with possibilities and probabilities, whereas traditional computing employs transistors to crunch through inflexible operations. Imagine a massive, intricate maze between starting point A and end point B. Classical computing would eventually navigate through the maze to point B successfully by trial and error. However, quantum computing would look at all possibilities simultaneously before narrowing in on the correct answer in much less time. And clearly, that’s a more efficient way of thinking.

But other than racing against traditional computers and inspiring prospective, future research projects, quantum computing hadn’t really done much to prove itself as a necessary part of scientific research, at least up until talk began about using Google’s Sycamore to create a time crystal. And Google was more than happy to show off its quantum wonder once again…^[6]

4 Diamond-Studded Qubits

It seems, however, that the Google team wasn’t actually the first to create a time crystal using qubits and a quantum computer. An institute in the Netherlands called QuTech announced their success in March of 2021, using nuclear spins in a diamond to demonstrate their “new state of matter.” Their crystal only existed for about eight seconds before starting to decay through environmental interactions. However, in a perfectly isolated system, it could have spun to its heart’s content forever.

QuTech collaborated with Element Six, an industrial artificial diamond provider, and UC Berkeley to create their baby from just nine qubits. Though they worked independently from the Google team, both projects were simultaneously active. Their experiment was also a good representation of just how diverse and individual quantum computers are in both design and implementation.^[1]

3 Google’s Turn at Temporal-Symmetry Breaking

Google’s success at creating a discrete time crystal in the summer of 2021 was much more publicized than the QuTech experiment because, well…Google is Google, a mega-powerful, multinational tech company with a recognizable color scheme we all see each day. But the academic power of the collaborating dream team also carried a lot of clout. We’re talking, for starters, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems, Stanford University, Oxford University, and, of course, the Google Quantum AI Lab, which is partnered with NASA.

This collaboration brought along mixed aspirations for their experiment other than just making a time crystal. The visiting physicists were also eager to see what Google’s Sycamore could offer them for future research projects exploring condensed matter physics, which is basically the study of the electromagnetic forces between atoms of liquids and solids. And Google was more than happy to utilize the experimental nature of their quantum computer beyond mere calculations, as they hadn’t really done a heck of a lot with it other than showing up IBM two years prior.

The team’s time crystal, made from 20 qubits, existed for only eight-tenths of a second. However, during that time, the computer observed over a million individual quantum states of their creation, even running it forward and backward through time (fascinating in itself), all to ensure that it showed indefinite oscillations in each. But while the crystal seemed to be perfect, its environment was not. And much like the one concocted at QuTech, it decayed due to interference. While it was active, however, it met all the criteria mentioned earlier to make the cut as a genuine discrete time crystal!

Google, of course, got most of the headlines and attention from the press for creating a new phase of matter. The scores of academics involved in the project were mighty proud to have their names on the article, which appeared in the November 30th issue of the science journal Nature. Beyond that, both teams at Google and QuTech showed the almost limitless possibilities of exploring theoretical physics one day soon through a next generation of quantum computers. And these have already proven they’re capable of doing more than just crunching numbers and navigating through mazes.^[8]

2 So…Did We Break the Laws of Thermodynamics or Not?

After the Google team announced the creation of their time, crystal sensationalist news headlines popped up, many of them declaring a breach in the laws of thermodynamics and a breakthrough in perpetual motion. These are monumental claims that go against the basic, empirical concept of physics. And they would be absolutely astounding if they were true. But they’re not.

The first and second laws of thermodynamics have been firmly established within the scientific community since the mid-19th century. The first deals with the conservation of energy, which cannot be created or destroyed within a closed system, neither one as small as at the molecular level nor as large as the universe itself. The second deals with the unavoidable concept of entropy and cautions that the energy in a closed system will eventually revert to uniform disorder.

Both of these laws prove the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine, as the energy used to charge the device would at least be converted to heat through friction. The orbital patterns of the planets in our solar system are often thought of as having perpetual motion. But because of an infinitesimally small loss of energy through gravitational waves, they are actually slowly spiraling in toward the sun. (We should take comfort, however, in the fact that the sun will more likely explode into a red giant star and expand to meet us far sooner than the Earth will descend to meet it!)

Time crystals, however, appear to break the laws of thermodynamics just like they break time-translational symmetry, as they can cycle between two states forever without losing energy. But they do not actually exist contrary to any existing law of physics, despite their novelty and uniqueness. For one thing, the laws of thermodynamics do not really pertain on a quantum level. In this case, the overall system, including the influence of the drive, conserves energy as it should, making the time crystal itself an individualized “loophole” of sorts. In other words, time crystals can suspend the laws of thermodynamics indefinitely without ever actually breaking them. And that sure sounds like a loophole!^[9]

But loopholes are often beneficial for those who know how to make good use of them. For example, people often jump for joy at tax loopholes that save them money or legal loopholes which keep them out of jail. So how might we advantageously harness this quantum loophole we know as time crystals?

1 What Can We Do with These Things Anyhow?

The bad news about the perpetual motion aspect of time crystals is that they’re probably useless, as the crystals are in their ground state—the state of least possible energy. It would be like putting dead batteries in a flashlight. And being made from particles in a quantum state, they’re not the kind of crystals you can wear about your neck. Neither are they pretty or shiny, and good luck even seeing one in person under current technology. Even though they can theoretically last forever, let us remind ourselves that Google’s time crystal endured for only eight-tenths of a second.

But let’s explore that for a moment, as there’s a vast difference between forever and eight-tenths of a second. Technically, the time crystal Google created was strong and robust and would have theoretically gone on cycling back and forth forever. However, the Sycamore chip itself was faulty and limited, as they all are. Furthermore, their crystal was made from qubits, which are vulnerable to interference from their environment—a condition called decoherence. Researchers are trying to improve the efficiency of quantum computers by better isolating the processors. Surprisingly, the answer to their problem might be in time crystals themselves…

Imagine a quantum computer powered by time crystals, which exist and fluctuate without burning energy, thus not falling victim to entropy (a random decline into disorder) like the rest of the darn universe. As mentioned above, the qubits that currently run quantum computers are fragile and easily suffer from decoherence, which basically leads to entropy in their entanglement. However, using highly stable time crystals instead would provide entanglement without entropy. Imagine the efficiency of next-generation quantum computing based on time crystals and, with enhanced predictability, the mysteries of our universe they might uncover. Imagine advances in chemistry to cure cancer, warp drives that propel us to distant stars, and energy sources not reliant on fossil fuels.^[10]

Imagine a whole new world of computing, and it’s coming real, real soon!