Physicists Reverse Time for Tiny Particles Inside a Quantum Computer

In a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers manipulated the arrow of time using a very tiny quantum computer made of two quantum particles, known as qubits. The experiment was carefully controlled by scientists and could definitely be a breakthrough in modern science!

The researchers used a quantum computer to simulate a single particle, its wave function spreading out over time like a ripple in a pond. Then, they wrote an algorithm in the quantum computer that reversed the time evolution of every single component of the wave function, essentially pulling that ripple back into the particle that created it. They accomplished this feat without increasing entropy, or disorder elsewhere in the universe, seemingly defying the arrow of time.

To read more about how these scientists essentially made the impossible happen, head on here to livescience.com!

Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons

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So they made a tiny video and then reversed the video. That's not running time backward, any more than in the 1940s Isaac Asimov's resublimated thiotimoline actually dissolved an instant before contact with water, leading to faster-than-light communication and winning horse-race bets, nor than I just caused time to go backward to the 1940s by remembering that.

Yet I've been having trouble finding a book from the 1980s (that's about halfway back in time to the 1940s) whose title and author I've forgotten, where the time-travel device is built into a VHS videocassette that you rewind and fast-forward to control. One of the characters is a black man who gets in trouble with the police in the past because of driving a car in a white place (New Jersey) with an attractive white female passenger and, having lost a component of the cassette (I'm fuzzy on that part), everyone gets back to their proper time by somehow using the trylon and perisphere of the New York world fair, which in the story is a secret giant Tesla coil. There's a chase through the World of the Future diorama. The book begins with a jet airplane trip (with a VHS deck in the cockpit), and there's a Russian spy/gangster involved. Hmm.

The best time-travel sound is in /Time Cop/. It's a deep, satisfying BHLOOMP, like a marble dropping into a toilet but slowed down by about eight times. That's very close to what real time travel sounds like. Maybe they really traveled back in time and recorded it. But it was probably the marble thing.

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Alex, we need a "I survived reversal of the time evolution of every single component of the wave function, pulling the ripple back into the particle that created it without increasing entropy" T-shirt in the store!!!