Time Crystals

[rikuoamero]

So I was checking out recent events on Wikipedia, and it says that something called 'time crystals' have been made in a laboratory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal

Most of what is said flies right over my head, but something did catch my eye. The first sentence of the page says

A time crystal or space-time crystal is an open system in non-equilibrium with its environment that exhibits time translation symmetry breaking (TTSB).

That is gobbledey-gook to me. However, a bit further on,

A violation in time-translation symmetry means that under certain conditions or select cases energy is not a conserved quantity and that laws of nature themselves are variable with time.

The reason that caught my eye is that of course, it reminded me of past debates with creationists, who have long argued that what we measure today such as the speed of light is not binding on what they say was in the past. If scientists say a certain star is 40,000 light years away, they say that the speed of light wasn't always the speed we measure it to be today.
So scientists, does this add fuel to the fire for creationists? The article does mention that deviations in the known laws of physics have been known for decades.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to rikuoamero]

The article does mention that deviations in the known laws of physics have been known for decades.

One problem with trying to stretch this kind of thing too far is that many of the physical constants were only "discovered" or defined in the last few hundred years, and only measured accurately far more recently. So it is impossible to know, for example, if the speed of light in a vacuum has ever changed over really long periods of time (billions of years), although current physics argues against that.

In 1638 Galileo concluded that the speed of light was at least 10x faster than the speed of sound. The first quantitative measurement of the speed of light (1676 by Ole Christensen Romer) was out by 26% (too low). It wasn't until 1862 that Foucault got close to the presently accepted value (he was out by only about 0.001%). Other constants like Planck's constant, Boltzmann's constant, etc. are also relatively recently defined and measured. So there is no way to know, from measurement, their change (if any) over long periods of time, or even short periods of time like a measly 6000 years (or whatever ridiculous date creationists are using these days for the time the creation event is claimed to have happened).

But it wouldn't surprise me if one of them tried to latch onto any new idea that could be twisted into a form that supported their argument, whether it had any implications for it or not.

[Kenisaw]

So I was checking out recent events on Wikipedia, and it says that something called 'time crystals' have been made in a laboratory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal

Most of what is said flies right over my head, but something did catch my eye. The first sentence of the page says

A time crystal or space-time crystal is an open system in non-equilibrium with its environment that exhibits time translation symmetry breaking (TTSB).

That is gobbledey-gook to me. However, a bit further on,

A violation in time-translation symmetry means that under certain conditions or select cases energy is not a conserved quantity and that laws of nature themselves are variable with time.

The reason that caught my eye is that of course, it reminded me of past debates with creationists, who have long argued that what we measure today such as the speed of light is not binding on what they say was in the past. If scientists say a certain star is 40,000 light years away, they say that the speed of light wasn't always the speed we measure it to be today.
So scientists, does this add fuel to the fire for creationists? The article does mention that deviations in the known laws of physics have been known for decades.

No. The speed of light does not just affect light. It is the universal speed limit. Gravity moves at the speed of light for example. If light had a different speed limit, a LOT of other things would be affected. Stars for example are a balance of the force of light pushing out and gravity pulling in. Change the speed of light and you've changed the balance in stars. If the speed of light was different the stars we see from long ago probably couldn't have existed. Quite the paradox for those that want to claim that the speed of light was ever different.

It's the same for things like radiometric dating. If radioactivity half lives were different, that means that the strong nuclear force had a different value in the past, which affects literally every atom in the universe.

Creationists often don't understand how interconnected all these things are. They rely and relate to each other, and you start changing one and you've affected many other things. We don't need time crystals one way or another to thoroughly debunk the "but we didn't see it back then" crowd...

[DanieltheDragon]

[Replying to post 1 by rikuoamero]

Time crystals specifically highlight why laymen should stay away from drawing conclusions in areas of very advanced physics. There is a lot to unpack with these things and the verbiage for it can be incredibly misleading to those unfamiliar with the science behind it.

So that being said I give it a year for some creationist apologist time to formulate a misleading inaccurate apologetic using time crystals. Precisely because it will go over most people's heads including the apologist...