Skizzomat

IT’S LIKE something out of a bad dream. You’re stuck in a dance hall performing an interminable waltz. The hours go by and the dance continues. The hours melt into days, years, centuries, millennia. Eventually, billions of years have passed in which the universe has transformed into a featureless void populated only by you and your fellow indefatigable waltzers, dancing throughout eternity.

The vision is surreal, nightmarish – and entirely against the laws of physics. Anything that repeats on loop without an external energy source to power it seems to bend the cast-iron laws of thermodynamics, which govern how energy flows and can be exploited. So when five years ago, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek speculated about a type of material that he called time crystals whose components could, in fact, do just that, he faced a wave of scepticism. “I took a lot of grief,” he says.

In the time since, Wilczek’s brainchildren have been championed, vilified, proved to be impossible, and now, apparently, made in the lab. If so, it’s the birth of an entirely new phase of matter, one that is fundamentally bizarre, perhaps confounding – and possibly even useful.

Time crystals might still be waiting to be invented if Wilczek were not the sort of person who gets bored easily. He won his Nobel prize in 2004 for theoretical insights into the nature of the strong force, which determines how fundamental particles interact within the atomic nucleus. He once described the experience of waiting for experimental verification of his theory as akin to watching grass grow. So when at some point his employer, the Massachusetts Institute …