Mind-bending materials called quasicrystals have an orderly structure, but without a regularly repeating pattern. They’ve been found in meteorites and the debris from the first atomic bomb test. Scientists have now discovered that they can theoretically inhabit an even stranger realm: spacetime, the blended mixture of time and space of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
Instead of existing in two or three spatial dimensions, these quasicrystals’ structures would bridge space and time, physicists report in a paper submitted January 12 to arXiv.org. Although the quasicrystals are theoretical, the researchers suggest that such spacetime quasicrystals may appear in nature, perhaps even underlying the structure of the universe.
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