Scientists have blown up a bunch of atoms like balloons to make an extreme version of an 'impossible' state of matter. By blasting rubidium atoms with lasers, physicists have excited them into a puffy Rydberg state in an experiment that results in the exotic state of matter known as a time crystal. This, the team says, opens up a new way to explore the properties of time crystals, as well as phenomena such as quantum fluctuations, correlation, and synchronization – an important factor in designing quantum computers. First described by US theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek in 2012, time crystals are...