Time Crystals

We are used to straight lines. We love them in fact. They make us feel comfortable…and powerful. “I can do it!” The Little Engine that Could moves straight ahead. Time lets us turn our backs on the settled past and our faces toward the undiscovered future. We are plough-horses, churning our fields, leaving our furrows.

We draw a line on a map to indicate our route. It’s ‘the shortest distance’; it’s the very definition of what we value most these days: ‘efficiency’.  Who doesn’t hate connecting flights? We think of logic as a sequence of deductions which we refer to as a ‘chain of reasoning’. So, we may be forgiven for thinking that all process must be Linear Process (LP):

A    →     B    →     C

We are even tempted to say, “What else could it be?” We have such poor imaginations! In fact, IRL nothing is ever perfectly linear. Better said: non-linearity approximates linearity. Better? “Looks straight to me” means “it’s not straight - but it’s straight enough for government work”. There are no straight lines in nature!

We’ve known at least since Newton that a reciprocal version of LP applies outside the realm of intentional behavior. Every action entails an equal and opposite reaction:

A         ↔         B

Lex Telonis, ‘an eye for an eye’, may have been our species’ first attempt to codify social justice. Although harsh to our ears, in its day it was an attempt to reign-in ‘street justice’. We can use the form of the LP schematic (above) to illustrate it:

A     →      B     →     A

Curiously, the much renowned Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) relies on the same modified LP, but this time inverted:

B     →      A     →      B

Makes sense: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ is the reverse of ‘Do unto others as they have done unto you’. Pay it forward…not payback!

It required the correction known as the Great Commandment (‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ - Leviticus and Matthew), to get us off-the-line:

But that’s just us. Our Eastern cousins have understood this longer…and perhaps more deeply; they call it ‘Karma’ – we call it, ‘what goes around comes around!’

This is a quantum of Pure Process (PP): A → B, B → C, C → A. I believe it is an irreducible ontological minimum. It’s also the schematic for a game you might know: Rock-Paper-Scissors. 

It’s the Great Mandala; “take your place” anywhere: there are no preferred spots, no asymmetries, no singularities; it has no beginning and no end. It’s a spiral – with a ‘degenerate’ 3rd dimension. Here, process is not a means to an end (because there are no ends). 

We mistakenly think of acts as open ended bits of string. That is not what an act is. An act is a closed loop. An act leaves nothing to chance. It is ‘objectively immortal’ (but not yet ‘eternal’); it is a settled matter of fact after the fact!  It is the process of its own confection.

In school, we learned to diagram sentences by separating the subject from the predicate; IRL that’s the one thing you can never do! Naked subjects and naked predicates don’t just bump into one another on the senior prom dance floor; they must at least be ‘going steady’ first.  

Pure Process (PP) can be diagrammed differently by other thinkers in other contexts. Christians, for example, could use a similar schematic to illustrate Trinitarian Process (TP): 

Karl Marx might have used the graphic to illustrate the Dialectical Process (DP):

Then there’s The Beatles’ variation: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together…” (I am the Walrus) Note that this has the same structure as ‘Trinitarian Process’ (above), just rotated:

There are even ways to model Pure Process for non-orientable spaces. In common with fermions (massive subatomic particles), non-orientable spaces are characterized by 720° symmetry vs. (the 360° we’re used to):  

Jim Croce promised us ‘time in a bottle’. Well, what if I could give it to you in a crystal instead? Plain, ordinary crystals, like the Hope Diamond for example, consist of molecules arranged in a fixed pattern that repeats in space. 

What if we could do the same with time? Would you trade that rock you’re sporting on your finger for a crystal of time? What if I threw in Knicks tickets? 

In ordinary crystals, like salt or quartz, atoms are arranged in a repeating spatial pattern. But in time crystal patterns repeat over time, in a regular, repeating cycle returning to the same positions over and over. This movement happens without using energy – it's stable, perpetual motion at the atomic level. 

A time crystal is a state of matter that has periodic motion ‘built-in’ to its structure. We are used to states of matter where energy dissipates, motion slows. Stasis, aka my couch, is the Great Attractor; it is thought to be the most energy efficient state of affairs. My rounded body can attest; it is powerful! 

But oscillation (motion) in a time capsule turns out to be more energy efficient even than stasis. Crazy? Maybe not. “Everything moves.” People often rock back and forth from one foot to another, they bounce when they hunker, and my dad could not relax unless his hands were fidgeting and his toes tapping. 

We are just beginning to unlock the mysteries of this new state of matter. It demonstrates what Process Philosophers (e.g. Alfred North Whitehead) have been saying all along: Process is primary; time is just one possible aspect of process. 

Just ‘yesterday’ (October 14, 2025, Nature Physics) a team of scientists headed by Leo Joon Il Moon announced the discovery of a new family of time crystals they’re calling Rondeau Time Crystals (rondeau for the musical form called a ‘round’). 

‘Ordinary’ time crystals (as if ‘time in a bottle’ could ever be ordinary) evolve through their cycle smoothly and deterministically. Not so, Rondeau! These crystals are characterized by the presence of a chaotic phase between two perfectly determined bookends. 

Rather than enjoying a continuous identity (as with ordinary time crystals), Rondeau Time Crystals exhibit ‘stroboscopic’ identity (aka Eigenstate order): “the coexistence of temporal disorder on short timescales and temporal order on long timescales.” (Moon)

“This enables us to freely engineer the form of non-deterministic micromotion dynamics (chaotic phase), without compromising the stability of the coexisting long-range temporal…order (deterministic phase).”

English: What happens in Vegas (disorder) stays in Vegas; it does not compromise the order that surrounds it. 

As if the 21^st century discovery of time crystals was not mind-boggling enough, Moon has taken things to an entirely new level. In our view, this discovery has major philosophical and even theological implications, as well as physical. We look forward to exploring those implications in detail in future posts on this site. Bookmark us…and as always, “Stay tuned.” (The best is yet to come.)

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