If you plucked a hypothetical frictionless guitar string, would that be a space-time crystal?
Dude, step away from the keyboard until you’re sober again.
I think he’s talking about this Time crystal - Wikipedia
"A time crystal or space-time crystal is a structure that repeats in time, as well as in space. Normal three-dimensional crystals have a repeating pattern in space, but remain unchanged as time passes. Time crystals repeat themselves in time as well, leading the crystal to change from moment to moment. A time crystal never reaches thermal equilibrium, as it is a type of non-equilibrium matter — a form of matter proposed in 2012, and first observed in 2017. "
“The idea of a time crystal was first described by Nobel laureate and MIT professor Frank Wilczek in 2012. Later work developed a more precise definition for time crystals. It was proven that they cannot exist in equilibrium.[1] Then, in 2014 Krzysztof Sacha at Jagiellonian University in Krakow predicted the behaviour of discrete time crystals in a periodically-driven many-body system.[2] In 2016, Norman Yao et al. at the University of California, Berkeley proposed a different way to create time crystals in spin systems. From there, Christopher Monroe and Mikhail Lukin independently confirmed this in their labs. Both experiments were published in Nature in 2017.”
Huh, that actually makes some sense, then. Thank you, Andy L.
The first issue that I can see is that a non-dissipative guitar string won’t behave the way you’d expect when plucked. We’re used to a guitar string forming a nice sinusoidal pattern when plucked. But really, a pluck will excite a large number of modes (infinite, actually, though most of them will be very low amplitude), each with its own frequency, resulting in a very complicated waveform. In real life, the higher-frequency modes dissipate more quickly, resulting in the total waveform quickly being dominated by the fundamental, which is why we think of the form as being clean.
Now, that in itself would still be periodic, since all of the higher modes have frequencies which are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. But that actually only holds to the extent that the displacement is small compared to the length of the string, and that’s never going to be completely true, either. So even without dissipation, you’ll still get some energy transfer between the modes, and so it won’t exactly repeat at all.
Other issues are that a guitar string is not a crystal and a vibrating guitar string isn’t rearranging the crystal lattice that it isn’t.
Oh, and I also owe an apology to EastUmpqua, for assuming that his question was chemically-induced, when it turns out it was actually sane.
There should be a term for that-maybe “reality whoosh”?
No problem. Thanks for the insight about non-dissipation and transfer of energy between modes.
Nothing for OP?
ETA: Wow, A guy who works 9-5 in really weird reality that nobody gets himself is reality-whooshed.
A lesson for us all.