Frank Wilczek's fraudulent hype (fake news are more rampant in science than in politics):

"IT'S LIKE something out of a bad dream. You're stuck in a dance hall performing an interminable waltz. The hours go by and the dance continues. The hours melt into days, years, centuries, millennia. Eventually, billions of years have passed in which the universe has transformed into a featureless void populated only by you and your fellow indefatigable waltzers, dancing throughout eternity. The vision is surreal, nightmarish - and entirely against the laws of physics. Anything that repeats on loop without an external energy source to power it seems to bend the cast-iron laws of thermodynamics, which govern how energy flows and can be exploited. So when five years ago, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek speculated about a type of material that he called time crystals whose components could, in fact, do just that, he faced a wave of scepticism. "I took a lot of grief," he says. In the time since, Wilczek's brainchildren have been championed, vilified, proved to be impossible, and now, apparently, made in the lab."
https://www.newscientist.com/article...ricks-forever/

Frank Wilczek's time crystals are regularly kicked by the experimentalist - no "interminable waltz":

Philip Ball: "But to make that happen, the researchers must deliver kicks to the spins, provided by a laser or pulses of microwaves, to keep them out of equilibrium. The time crystals are sustained only by constant kicking, even though - crucially - their oscillation doesn't match the rhythm of the kicking." http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/bl...cience-physics

There are genuine time crystals "kicked" by ambient heat and breathtakingly violating the second law of thermodynamics. Here is an "interminable waltz" of water in an electric field, obviously able to produce work - e.g. by rotating a waterwheel:

"The Formation of the Floating Water Bridge including electric breakdowns" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17UD1goTFhQ

"The water movement is bidirectional, i.e., it simultaneously flows in both directions." https://www.wetsus.nl/home/wetsus-ne...n-innovation/1

The work will be done at the expense of what energy? The first hypothesis that comes to mind is:

At the expense of electric energy. The system is, essentially, an electric motor.

However, close inspection would suggest that the hypothesis is untenable. Scientists use triply distilled water to reduce the conductivity and the electric current passing through the system to minimum. If, for some reason, the current is increased, the motion stops - such system cannot be an electric motor.

If the system is not an electric motor, then it is ... a perpetual-motion machine of the second kind! Here arguments describing perpetual-motion machines as impossible, idiotic, etc. are irrelevant - the following conditional is valid:

IF THE SYSTEM IS NOT AN ELECTRIC MOTOR, then it is a perpetual-motion machine of the second kind.

In other words, if the work is not done at the expense of electric energy, then it is done at the expense of ambient heat, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. No third source of energy is conceivable.

Pentcho Valev