In June, at a conference set in the picturesque Italian town of Campagna, south-east of Naples, two physicists in a seemingly endless argument over a long-sought theory of fundamental reality caught my attention. From the sidelines, an unassuming figure politely interrupted them. "I've got a slide that might help. Can I put it up?" asked Frank Wilczek. The slide, concisely describing the realms in which this theory may act, swiftly ended the dispute.

The crystal is able to forever cycle between states without losing energy. Researchers working in partnership with Google may have just used the tech giant's quantum computer to create a completely new phase of matter -- a time crystal. With the ability to forever cycle between two states without ever losing energy, time crystals dodge one of the most important laws of physics -- the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the disorder, or entropy, of an isolated system must always increase. These bizarre time crystals remain stable, resisting any dissolution into randomness, despite existing in a constant state of flux. According to a research article posted July 28 to the preprint database arXiv, scientists were able to create the time crystal for roughly 100 seconds using qubits (quantum computing's version of the traditional computer bit) inside the core of Google's Sycamore quantum processor.

Today, Avenga Labs is here with the latest news about the cloud, and AI for NLP and developers, but at the end I'll address the event that is predicted to be the most important scientific breakthrough of our lifetime. EC2 is one of the oldest services available in the AWS cloud. There was a lot of noise generated by this announcement. In fact, it's a very old service from more than 15 years ago and it hasn't been recommended for use (required explicit permission) since 2013. The actual usage was minimal according to many sources.

In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google's quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine "time crystal." In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond. A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy. "The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics," said Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper. That's the law that says disorder always increases.