Precision, presumption, and "time crystals"

If there's one thing I have learned from years of studying science, it's that precision is critical.

I'm not talking about mathematical precision, here, although that's pretty important, too.  What I'd like to consider today is how imprecise, or even flippant, use of terms can lead to misunderstanding.  Further, it can result in a complete misrepresentation of what the science actually says.

It can also give false hopes to the woo-woos, and heaven knows, we can't have that.

We've already seen this in two other cases -- how physicist Leon Lederman's injudicious choice of the nickname "The God Particle" for the Higgs boson led some ultrareligious types to claim that its discovery last year proved that god exists, and how demonstrations of quantum entanglement resulted in wingnuts of Diane Tessman's ilk to write reams of nonsense describing how the phenomenon was the explanation of everything from consciousness to telepathy.  (In fact, entanglement seems to be useless for communicating information; the speed of light remains the upper bound to the speed with which meaningful information can be transmitted.  Oh, and the Higgs boson has nothing whatsoever to do with a deity.)

I ran into another example of this yesterday, in an article whose title alone was enough to raise eyebrows: "Perpetual Motion Test Could Amend Theory of Time."  In it, we hear about the research of MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, who has been researching a peculiar construct called a "time crystal:"

In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of “time crystals” — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. Unlike clocks or any other known objects, time crystals derive their movement not from stored energy but from a break in the symmetry of time, enabling a special form of perpetual motion.

Now, the author of this piece, Natalie Wolchover, is pretty clear that the emphasis should be on the words "special form" and not on the words "perpetual motion:"

Now, a technological advance has made it possible for physicists to test the idea. They plan to build a time crystal, not in the hope that this perpetuum mobile will generate an endless supply of energy (as inventors have striven in vain to do for more than a thousand years) but that it will yield a better theory of time itself.

Further, the article ends on a cautionary note:

(S)ome physicists... remain deeply skeptical.  "I personally think it’s not possible to detect motion in the ground state," (theoretical physicist Patrick) Bruno said. "They may be able to make a ring of ions in a toroidal trap and do some interesting physics with that, but they will not see their ever-ticking clock as they claim."

Unfortunately, the caution hasn't traveled along with the story.  The site io9, which covers "science, science fiction, and the future," amplified Wilczek's research into an article titled "Physicists Believe It's Possible to Build a Perpetual Motion Machine."  It quotes, and links, the Wolchover story, but begins with the rather presumptuous phrase "All bets are off."  And if you want to take a further climb down the ladder, read the comments that follow the io9 iteration of the story, a few of which I quote verbatim below:

"Let's say this turns out to be true: how much energy could these things generate? Are there any immediate practical uses that come to mind?  ...I mean if a football field sized grid of these things could only power an alarm clock it's not very practical, but I am completely in the dark about what sort of energy yield we are talking about here."

"If we up the scale a bit, we can get nearly or very long perpetual motion/energy from a Dyson sphere, so of course it's possible.. Is it doable now - well that's completely different matter."

"Haven't we watched enough movies about how this will lead to a black hole, tear to a different dimension, or the entire planet crumbling?"

"What's more important, in my mind, is "breaks in the symmetry of time" which sounds so much like science fiction I wonder if it could lead to time travel...  More interesting than that... could it lead to reactionless space drive or faster than light travel?"

Okay, can you people just chill out a little?

First, let's focus on the fact that first, Wilczek hasn't even demonstrated that these things exist on the microscopic level, much less the macroscopic.  I mean, I think they sound intriguing, and wish him all the luck in the world, but maybe it might be a good idea to see if they're even real before we start trying to power our spaceships with them.

Second, even if they do exist, I'm pretty sure they'll be reconcilable with the existing laws of physics, which have been tested every which way from Sunday.  The idea that Wilczek's "time crystals" (speaking of an injudicious choice of a name for a phenomenon...) turn out to be real, I highly doubt that this will revoke the General Theory of Relativity or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  "Free energy," in the sense of some system generating more energy than it consumes, will remain impossible.  So calling this thing a "perpetual motion machine" equates it with the device the cranks have been trying to produce for hundreds of years, just as Wolchover pointed out, and isn't all that accurate in any case.

Of course, all this won't stop the wingnuts from making all sorts of bizarre claims about what Wilczek's yet-to-be-tested theories imply.  Look for Diane Tessman to weigh in soon, probably stating that "time crystals" explain déjà vu and precognitive dreams.

I'm already arranging cushions on my desk to protect my forehead from the faceplant that will result.

Thought vs. experiment

To a scientist, there's no more fundamental approach to knowledge than experimentation.  You want to find something out?  Design an experiment to see if your idea about how the world works is correct.  Good scientists are always testing, questioning, and trying to find new ways to tweak the system and see how it responds.

What's fascinating from a historical perspective is that this is a fairly new way to approach knowledge.  In general, the pre-Enlightenment attitude was that if you wanted to learn, you simply had to think about stuff.  Thought was considered to be the purest way to gain knowledge; no need to contaminate your brain with dirty, clunky, uncooperative matter.  Even Kepler started out from this standpoint -- when he first started to work on the problem of the shapes of planetary orbits, he began from the assumption that they were circles (because circles are "perfect") and that the relationship between one planet's orbit and the next had something to do with the "Five Perfect Solids" of Greek mathematical theory.  Fortunately, Kepler was (1) working with a rigorous experimentalist, Tycho Brahe, and (2) honest, because he found out pretty quickly that his ideas weren't working -- and was forced to the uncomfortable conclusion that planetary orbits were messy, lopsided ellipses.  Galileo, you might recall, faced persecution for church officials not because of heresy with regards to religious doctrine, per se -- his problems with the Vatican started because of three claims, one famous (his acceptance of the heliocentric model) and the other two less-known (his rejection of Aristotle's claims that an object's falling speed is dependent on its mass, and that objects float or sink in water depending upon their shape).  It's fascinating, and not a little horrifying, that church officials had demonstrated for them experiments supporting Galileo's conclusions -- and they still didn't believe the evidence of their eyes, preferring instead the "pure thought" of Aristotle and Plato, for whom experimentation was somehow intrinsically suspect.

Amazingly, that idea -- that you can arrive at the truth just by thinking about it -- lingers still.  Some of it is relatively innocent, the sort of thing I see in high school science classes -- misconceptions that stem from the thought, "Well, of course it works that way.  That seems logical."  More insidious, though, are the schools of thought that embrace that approach, that deliberately eschew experimentation in favor of contemplation.  And in the last couple of days, I found two excellent examples of just this way of thinking.

The first one was in the online version of Fate magazine, so I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised, considering the source.  Entitled, "Auric Energy Fields and Their Effects on Electronics," the article in question, written by "noted wisdom teacher" Kala Ambrose, looks at the alleged phenomenon of people whose presence can somehow interfere with electronic devices from computers to DVRs to streetlights.  And she makes the following statement:

As a psychic, I see the aura around people, which is a flexible field of energy around the body with many layers. The level closest to your body, is described as the etheric body and in a sense, it’s the battery of the body, receiving and emitting electrical impulses in and out from your body. You bring energy in and you release energy, all through the auric body. There are many layers extending outward from the etheric body including the mental layer and the emotional layer, both of which are also energy fields where we store and emit energy and we bring this energy into and down into the physical body from these layers... For some people, who also tend to have psi abilities, they release this pent up energy in a wave. I refer to it as an energy blast, which can affect the environment around them. One way that these people begin to notice this effect, is that they will find when walking or driving by street lights, that the lights will go off or turn on when they pass by. If this has happened to you, you are releasing this pent up energy or someone near you is releasing their energy... The over-abundance of energy that you described, can affect lights and other electronics when released in a quick blast. Think of it as an energy surge. Typically this indicates that the person is not aware of the energy they are releasing and so it comes as a surprise when an electronic device is affected. For many people, they emit this energy the strongest when they are agitated, stressed or in a high emotional state (positive or negative).

Now, let's assume for a moment, just for fun, that the phenomenon is real; i.e., that the people who claim to interfere with electronic devices are telling the truth.  What I find the most interesting about Kala Ambrose's claims is that never once does she seem to think, "Hey!  If some guy's body is emitting enough energy to interfere with a computer, that has to be measurable!  Maybe we should build a device to measure, test, and study this 'auric energy field.'"  No, she seems to believe that all you need to do to understand this is to think about it:

The next time this occurs, stop right away and ask yourself, How am I feeling, What’s on my mind right now? Also ask those present what they noticed when it occurred. Gather this information to discern what the triggers are that set off the energy spikes.

An even more striking example of this philosophical approach to science comes from Joseph Farrell's blog Giza Death Star, in which he responds to a press release from the world of physics in a post titled "Space-Time Crystals."  Farrell, to his credit, posts a link to the original press release, and from that press release we learn that Frank Wilczek of MIT and Xiang Zhang and Tongcang Li of UC Berkeley are working on trapping loops of ions inside crystals, creating an rotating charge signal that would "(break) temporal symmetry."  Wilczek is careful to specify that the "space-time crystal" thus created would span only extremely small distances (a tenth of a millimeter) and exist only at phenomenally low temperatures (one-billionth of a degree Kelvin), and that "being in their ground states, such systems could not be employed to produce useful work."

Farrell, on the other hand, begs to differ.

He says that he beat Wilczek, Zhang, and Li to the punch years ago, and did it without ever performing a single experiment:

Way back when, when I began writing my high speculations and sharing them with the public, I began by deciding to “take the plunge” and “high dive” off the deep end, and share my hypothesis that the Great Pyramid may have been a sophisticated kind of phase conjugate mirror manipulating the fabric of the physical medium itself. And at the end of my first book on the subject, I speculated on a kind of crystal that would somehow be able to trap and rotate EM waves. Not knowing what to call such bizarre things, I simply call them “phi” crystals, since they were suggested to me by the constant phi, and by the Fibonacci sequence. My reason for thinking that such crystals would be an integral component of any such machine was simply that there would have to be some sort of coupled oscillator able to interact with the “rotation moment” of the fabric and structure of the local medium, or local space-time.

Now, from my admittedly rather rudimentary understanding of physics, this sounds like a lot of horse waste right from the get-go, but what I find the most interesting about all of Farrell's blathering on about this is that he jumps right past Wilczek's cautions that since space-time crystals are in their ground state, the laws of thermodynamics would render it impossible for them to perform work -- and describes how these curiosities could become "sources of energy" that would "make our largest thermonuclear bombs look like firecrackers."

And how did he arrive at all of this?  Apparently, just by pondering the Fibonacci sequence and other such constructs:

But imagine, for a moment, the possibility that such a technology could be turned into, say, a source of energy...  (T)o my mind anyway, the possibility – long term to be sure – opens up that such things could eventually become sources of energy. We’re a long way from that, to be sure, and even a long way of any such verified understandings of these wildly speculative ideas, but nonetheless, the possibility should be mentioned.

I find it even more curious that Farrell is weighing in on subtle concepts in physics when his own Ph.D. is in patristics.  What is patristics, you might ask?  I had to ask, because I didn't know, and found out that patristics is "the study of early Christian writers, known as the Church Fathers."  Yup, that will certainly prepare you to comprehend abstruse concepts in solid-state physics.

So, anyway, the Platonic ideal of arriving at knowledge just by analyzing it with Pure Thought is with us still, apparently.  And just as it did in the case of Galileo's detractors, without the foundation of data, evidence, and experiment to support it, theoretical musings are just as likely to go wrong as right.  It is exactly this error in approach that science corrects -- even though there are people out there who still don't see why all that silly experimentation should be necessary.