perpetuum mobile

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we are led to a tantalising research project that if it fully pans out bypasses the second law of thermodynamics (see also, that energy in a system tends to wind down and dissipate) and have created “time crystals” as predicted by Richard Feynman in 1982. An exotic state of matter produced and maintained within a quantum computer, the matrix of atoms continually flips between two states without expending any energy, forever—like a perpetual motion machine.