Time of Time Crystals: Frank Wilczek’s Seventies

W.Only once did something go wrong with Frank Wilczek. It was in 1999 when a scholarly journal asked him to comment on a letter to the editor. Its author had questioned whether a particle accelerator near New York could inadvertently create a black hole in which Manhattan disappears first and then the entire planet. Wilczek stated that this was unreasonable, but did not declare it impossible – physicists reserve this word for processes that violate the fundamental laws of nature. This professional secretariat of a physics professor dated With The large accelerator laboratories soon gave rise to a tangible PR problem, which escalated even more after the establishment of the Commissions of Inquiry.

Wilczek never had a single one at the time Nobel prize. The physicist from New York with his Polish and Italian ancestors, who initially studied mathematics so that they would not have to undergo training in experimental physics, obtained it only in 2004. The discovery for which he was honored by his doctoral supervisor and another researcher, was already published in 1973. It was Wilczyk was 21 years old at the time and he hadn’t even started his doctoral thesis. The Nobel Prize winning work was his first ever publication, but it laid the theoretical foundation stone for the Standard Model of Elementary Particles.

The saving gap in theory

In it, Wilczek explained why quarks, the building blocks of fundamental particles, cannot be isolated: they exert forces on each other that increase in strength as the particles are further apart. So if you tried to split a proton into quarks and pump more and more energy into the main particle, you would only achieve the new quarks embodied from it due to the mass-energy equivalence, which would stick to the existing particles.

It never occurred to Wilczek to rest on these and other glories. In 2012, he made a discovery that would have made him famous had it not already been for him. There he developed a model for what’s called a time crystallization, a time-cyclic system in a lower energy state – just as crystal lattices are cyclical in space. When other theorists proved three years later that this was impossible, Wilczek was lucky enough to be able: the evidence had a loophole and there is a special kind of time crystal. In 2017, these strange cases were experimentally proven.