How Marvel’s Time Stone is based on Real Time Crystals

Is the Time Stone in the Eye of Agamotto from Marvel’s Dr. Strange based on real science? Yes! The Time Stone is in fact an example of an object that physicists have recently dreamed up and actually made, called a time crystal.

Spiros Michalakis, a mathematical physicist at CalTech and advisor for movies like Dr. Strange and Ant-Man, explains that the Time Stone is actually based on time crystals that has now been created inside a quantum computer.

The atoms in ordinary crystals are all lined up in an orderly pattern, like a 3D checkerboard, or a lattice. It’s symmetrical in space. Theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek asked whether we could make crystals that are symmetrical not in space but in TIME. This would mean that the particles it contains are constantly rearranging themselves into different configurations. But at regular intervals in time, they return to exactly the same configuration.

Time crystals could be used to make better atomic clocks for more accurate GPS or better quantum computers.
The regular, periodic behavior acts like a child on a swing. But just like a child’s swing needs a swing or some energy to keep moving, so do time crystals.

But there is one a big difference: When you push a child on a swing, the oscillations happen at the same frequency as the pushing. But with time crystals, the period of the oscillations, or the length of time it takes for the particles to return to their original configuration, is not the same as the period of the pushing. It can be any whole-number multiple longer. So the crystal oscillates at its own pace regardless of the pace of the energy being added to it. And because the periodicity is some whole-number multiple of the driving period, they are called discrete time crystals.

This concept of the periodicity of time crystals emerging from within the crystal itself rather than from any external source, was the inspiration for the idea of time manipulation in the Dr. Strange Marvel movies. Know that scientists don’t really think we can manipulate time using time crystals, but there’s some logic to this idea. Since time crystals take in energy from their surroundings but their periodic ticking rate is their own, the idea in the movie was that the Time Stone can somehow seal off a part of space and time and impose its own internal clock on the flow of time there.

The advisers also used another speculative idea called the holographic universe to justify how this time isolation happens. The holographic principle says that the total amount of information inside a volume of space can be encoded on the boundary of that volume. Relating this to our universe, it means that all the information contained in our universe, could be encoded on its boundary infinitely far away. This is like a 3D hologram created on a 2D surface.

So all of reality could be a kind of quantum computation taking place in that quantum boundary realm and everything is made of quantum code. So a quantum time crystal can take a patch of that quantum code – a bit of reality, whether past, present or future – and rewire it to transform the way time moves within it. The Time Stone, taking in energy from its surroundings, imposes its own pulse on the way time flows inside the bit of the universe that it controls.

This is not total fantasy, because time crystals are real. And we’ve made them. How are time crystals made? One of the ways to make them is to take a row of atoms that act like little magnets; they have a spin, which can point in one direction or the other – up or down. In the time-crystal state, the spins would keep flipping back and forth along the row like a stadium wave. They would do this with some kind of period – making the structure a time crystal. You would just need to keep adding energy in order to sustain this wave.

But so far, the idea of these time crystals being able to create an isolated holographic quantum realm where time can exist differently than the real world is still only a Hollywood fantasy.

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