There are all sorts of other fun experiments you can do. Last year, Bloch’s team tracked the insulator-superfluid transition and showed that the system goes through a “hidden” phase of matter—a subtly patterned arrangement that conventional theory doesn’t capture...
Yet another experiment touches on the fundamental question of what determines the speed of events in the world... They began with an insulator, dialed up the interaction energy, and watched the atoms start to self-organize. A wave of activity spread though the system at twice the speed of sound. What governed the velocity was that atoms did not passively roll on the wave, but actively contributed to it. Some quantum gravity theorists have speculated that the speed of light represents the Lieb-Robinson bound of some underlying quantum system out of which space and time emerge.
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