Weird ‘time crystals’ are made visible at last - nature - NEWS15 September 2025

Time crystals, a state of matter once thought physically impossible, could soon be on a banknote.

A time crystal is a form of matter that shows continuous, repeating patterns over time, much like how atoms in a normal crystal repeat in space. Examples once existed in only complex, quantum matter, but now physicists have found a way to make a time crystal that can be seen, under certain conditions, with the naked eye.

Impossible machines

Nobel-prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek first proposed the idea of a time crystal in 2012. Wilczek’s version was almost like a perpetual-motion machine; something that cycled endlessly while in its natural resting state. A team later published a paper that mathematically proved this concept was impossible, but researchers soon found that other kinds of time crystal were possible. Ordered time crystals could exist, for example, in bizarre systems that were perpetually in flux, rather than at rest.

Read more here - Weird ‘time crystals’ are made visible at last

YouTube - Time Crystal