▲ 265 points
back
103 comments
"The best way to understand their approach is by considering something else ordered yet non-repeating: "quasicrystals." A typical crystal has a regular, repeating structure, like the hexagons in a honeycomb. A quasicrystal still has order, but its patterns never repeat. (Penrose tiling is one example of this.) Even more mind-boggling is that quasicrystals are crystals from higher dimensions projected, or squished down, into lower dimensions. Those higher dimensions can even be beyond physical space's three dimensions: A 2D Penrose tiling, for instance, is a projected slice of a 5-D lattice.
For the qubits, Dumitrescu, Vasseur and Potter proposed in 2018 the creation of a quasicrystal in time rather than space. Whereas a periodic laser pulse would alternate (A, B, A, B, A, B, etc.), the researchers created a quasi-periodic laser-pulse regimen based on the Fibonacci sequence. In such a sequence, each part of the sequence is the sum of the two previous parts (A, AB, ABA, ABAAB, ABAABABA, etc.). This arrangement, just like a quasicrystal, is ordered without repeating. And, akin to a quasicrystal, it's a 2D pattern squashed into a single dimension. That dimensional flattening theoretically results in two time symmetries instead of just one: The system essentially gets a bonus symmetry from a nonexistent extra time dimension."
Feeling resigned to just not understanding this one as a lay person. Oh well, hope it leads to more cool things!
So essentially this is somehow akin to a network with hypercube topology - it’s got a mathematical relationship to an extra dimension but there’s no physical extra dimension.
Does this then count as a sort of "holographic time"? Encoding two dimensions on a single stream of time.
But that's saying that if you have something repeating in the same way along the X axis, you have two spacial dimensions. That's not the way most of us use "dimensions". (The math may work out for their usage to not be nonsense, but it's considerably less than a "real" extra time dimension.)
"There are no quasicrystals only quasi scientists"
~Linus Pauling
Will this affect the reliability and sustainability of quantum computing?
Is time is distorted space ???
Dear quantum physicists, when will you stop messing with our minds? Just when we'd warmed up to superpositions over 2^n qubit states, you had to introduce extra time dimensions?
Tbf, the quasi-periodic pulsing explanation is a lot more understandable than the headline had me think. Sounds like the second dimension is just a mathematical interpretation, just like you can reason about which higher-dimensional objects would give rise to a particular 2D pattern if projected onto a plane - it doesn't necessarily mean that the extra dimensions are really there, it just provides us with a new way of thinking about it mathematically (although I wouldn't be surprised if some quantum physicists came round the corner arguing that the second time dimension is actually there, sigh).
I wonder if one of the reasons more advanced physics can be intractable to understand is because of all of the clever interpretations. By abstracting raw empirical results into an analogous interpretation that defies ordinary logic, we are introducing gates to understanding by some cleverness test.
I see this for instance in the difference between elementary quantum explanations and something more like the Standard Model. One is concerned with indoctrinating some kind of belief or interpretation of phenomenon, even introducing philosophical and unfallsifiable elements, and the other is a useful index of known bits and pieces and their interactions found through empirical digging.
I blame the string theorists. A single time dimension ought to be enough for everyone.
I fully expect us to find multiple time dimensions to actually exist.
But that is just a selfish hope for free will to exist.
think about it:
taps head
If it's a time 'line' then you don't get to pick your direction - no choice is no free will, only if a line exists in a plane does choice come into the picture. /s
Yeah, it reminds me that as a student I always felt that it's "cute" that a hyperbola can be considered as a 2d section of a double cone, but that this property doesn't really help me in any way when working with them.
Yeah, no, I'm happy in Newton's world thank you very much.
> the quasi-periodic pulsing explanation is a lot more understandable
Whenever I see something may be periodic, it makes me think it just lives in the Complex plane - maybe time is imaginary :headexplode:
Interesting article. The part that caught my attention was:
"Even more mind-boggling is that quasicrystals are crystals from higher dimensions projected, or squished down, into lower dimensions. Those higher dimensions can even be beyond physical space's three dimensions: A 2D Penrose tiling, for instance, is a projected slice of a 5-D lattice."
I've been working on creating digital mandala software for the past 10 years, and have created countless digital fractal mandala patterns during that time, and I've noticed that something really interesting can happen when you do that with a tool that enables quick and recursive creation of this kind of images.
After creating a pattern for 4-5 hours for example, after that the patterns would continue be visualized inside my eyelids once I would close my eyes, evolving into new patterns that I did not draw on the screen, in a seemingly intelligent way, finding new shapes and patterns that I could not have created by myself, but some part of me continues visualizing these shapes into new, alive feeling forms inside my eyelids.
Many times these patterns would continue living inside my eyelids when I go to sleep, and even sometimes continue right away when I awoke after that night. And this completely sober even.
This effect can be magnified exponentially when combined with some mind altering entheogenics, but it works completely sober also.
It is hard to describe, but the feeling has been many times that I am looking at an "2D shadow" of something that lives beyond this current moment, like I am seeing a slice of time represented in 2D about a higher dimensional form that is not possible to visualize with current tools.
This article would push towards confirming my theories about forms existing that we only see parts of in slices of time, but somehow we can connect to those higher dimensional versions through the act of mandala creation.
Just wanted to share some thoughts on the subject, it is not something I claim to understand at all. If you want to test this out yourself, we have a trial version of our software available at http://www.OmniGeometry.com :-)
Would be interesting to hear if you have some thoughts on this subject. The act of creating mandalas is something many spiritual traditions also have utilized to connect us to the coherence of the greater patterns, like the tibetan monks creating sand mandalas and then wiping them away.
Our brains are general purpose pattern-matching machines, self-programmed by their environment.
Intense interest in anything, will eventually train models within the mind that not only recognise higher order patterns, but predict them too.
Those “predictions” come from the intuitive parts of our mind - they bubble up - seemingly from nowhere. There is a lot of wonder about this, and it is fun to explore (say making music, or playing with patterns). The predictions are not part of our rational (imperative?) step-by-step mind.
We also create irrational narratives to explain where our intuitions came from - the successful startup founder explaining their route - the mystic explaining their source.
It grew out of tasks in which he asked a split-brain person to explain in words, which uses the left hemisphere, an action that had been directed to and carried out only by the right one. “The left hemisphere made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation.” In one of Gazzaniga's favourite examples, he flashed the word 'smile' to a patient's right hemisphere and the word 'face' to the left hemisphere, and asked the patient to draw what he'd seen. “His right hand drew a smiling face,” Gazzaniga recalled. “'Why did you do that?' I asked. He said, 'What do you want, a sad face? Who wants a sad face around?'.” The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.
I would classify what you experience as an instance of the Tetris effect.
I believe this is a common Phenomenon with a lot of different manifestations. I think it's scientifically boils down to hyperactive pattern matching by the brain. Is common with psychedelics and often manifests as a fractal growth but also manifest in normal life. A common sober example is seeing floaters in your vision. Most people have floaters but not all see them and not all the time. The brain gets a lot of information and passes it through a filter, and then tries to pattern fit it. Prolonged exposure to a certain stimulus or a fixation on it attenuates the filters down and the pattern fitting up.
With sufficient attenuation, the brain will simply fit any noise it sees into the pattern.
The idea is related to the Nobel prize winning vision cognition studies of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, where animals can be conditioned to not perceive vertical or horizontal lines.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/intl/bl...
This isn’t any sort of crank theory, I think this is basically what string theory amounts to: we experience a 4-dimensional projection of an N-dimensional space.
Also, in math, lots of things are projections of higher order objects into lower order spaces!
You might enjoy "The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (@Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg
Your software seems similar to iterated function systems (IFS, e.g. Apophysis) in principle, but it's deterministic.
On the philosopical side, these shapes are particular kind of thought-forms, something that mind naturally creates when it's not distracted by sensory input. The forms hardly have any profound meaning - they are just art created by bored mind - but sometimes they represent sonething profound.
For anybody whom might be interested in "what a 4D cube might look like..."
https://youtu.be/1wAaI_6b9JE?t=2360
The entire video in mesmerizing -- one of the coolest party tricks I've learned is the double-twisted morbius strip dissection.
You need to get out more
It's still a single flow of time right? So more like two time-scales than two time dimensions? e.g. day and night cycle plus monthly cycles happening together on the same time variable. Have I understood this all wrong?
That’s how I read it too. More that they’re encoding another aspect into their pulsing. But “multidimensional time atoms” is probably a much more appealing headline.
I am way outside of my field, but what you describe sounds like Fouerier series.
What you're describing is generally not considered two dimensions, but just different scales of one dimension.
2 dimensions of time would allow supertasks in our reality. A problem is solved in the perpendicular axis and the result is returned to our observer axis. No time travel paradoxes. Next thing after quantum computing.
In a world with two time dimensions there would be no such thing as causality: with a, b \in R^2 (the field of real numbers), a<b doesn't make sense, because two events can have the same distance from (0,0) but different angle \phi (modulo orientation of chosen frame of reference), and therefore I wouldn't be able to distinguish between past and future events in general. Causality breaks down.
Propagating along a 1D trajectory (ie flow of time) would then be along a 2D "trajectory" through which I would experience indefinitively many events at once, unclear which one impacts on which others. But clearly I perceive me writing this post "right now", and am about to push the send button..
When you observe a particle, you see it in a superposition of a indefinite number of states.
A photon moves at the speed of light, it does not experience the flow of time because of that, its whole lifetime is an instant from its point of view, and it "sees" the universe in the superposition of the states the universe goes through.
Similarly, the indefinite number of states of the particle could be observing a development in a time dimension in which the time does not flow for the observer.
They say, one man's instant, another man's eternity...
Relativity already has the inability to distinguish between past and future states built in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
I have no idea how 2D time would work, though.
Can't tell if trolling or not...
The "encoded" time dimension has a certain "Permutation City" flavor.
Says Dumitrescu, "I've been working on these theory ideas for over five years, and seeing them come actually to be realized in experiments is exciting."
Wait, he only specified one of the time dimensions he's been working in...j/k, any experiment showing unexpected temporal properties is fascinating!
Note, the sequence used here is what's normally known as the Fibonacci word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_word
nature article is paywalled, but looks like this arxiv from last year is the same?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09676 Dumitrescu et al
not my area, but I think they're working with 'floquet systems' (the same platform used to build a time crystal) and 'mbl systems' (a kind of quantum system that can be temporarily protected from thermodynamic entropy). I'm reaching, but I think both kinds of systems show extended lifetimes when you drive them externally with a periodic laser.
I think the Dumitrescu paper is building on work done in Else 2020 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.03584
The Else paper is using two lasers with non-ratio frequencies to extend the lifetime of these systems. The new dumitrescu paper is discretizing that approach by using a fibonacci sequence instead? and somehow this buys them a few more seconds of system coherence?
As far as I understand it, either two incommensurate frequencies or the Fibonacci sequence ABAAB… approach produce similar physics. The Fibonacci sequence is easier to simulate numerically on a (classical) computer because there is a recursive property to it that allows you to jump forward in time in large steps, making it nice for theorists even if the experiments are fairly similar.
They just need one more to catch up with the time cube guy.
Does anyone also feel reminded of the TCAP or Transcapacitor or Transfer Capacitor story / hoax from 1998?
Can someone attempt to explain what the implications of this would be on a more macro level?
"Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable"
Two time dimensions? So the metric signature is (+,+,-,-)?
Can someone ELI5
So is the Earth flat or not? That is, are there any mathematically possible ways the earth could be considered flat or two dimensional after all.