Scientists have built world’s first ‘time machine’ in experiment

This is very interesting on several levels. First here's some of the news.

Lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik said by putting scattered electrons back into their original shape they had effectively created a state which went against the 'direction of time'

www.thesun.co.uk...

Breaking: Scientists Have Reversed Time with a Quantum Computer

Scientists have reversed the direction of time with a quantum computer. The breakthrough study seems to contradict basic laws of physics and could alter our understanding of the processes governing the universe. In a development that also represents a major advance in our understanding of quantum computers, by using electrons and the strange world of quantum mechanics, researchers were able to turn back time in an experiment that is the equivalent of causing a broken rack of pool balls to go back into place.

www.sci-techuniverse.com...

Here's a link to the published paper.

arxiv.org...

This does show "time travel" in an extremely limited way. One of the keys to time travel is defying the 2nd law of thermodynamics and time reversing entropy and a cracked egg can move in a direction towards it's initial condition which we would say is backwards in time. This distinction is only in our minds because we only experience one direction.

So even if a universe was moving in a backwards direction it would still be moving forward because of entropy. We can be a universe that's in a timeline that's in a backwards direction when compared to another universe but these things have no meaning unless both universe exist together as one universe.

This doesn't mean anyone will be going back in time anytime soon or ever. This could tell us a lot about the nature of reality.

Here's an illustration of what this means.

Say you have a deck of card fresh out of the pack. This pack is in a low entropy state and it doesn't take a lot of information to describe the order of the deck. I could say:

The deck of cards is ordered A-K in all Hearts, then Spades, next is Diamonds and finally Clubs.

That's it.

When I shuffle the deck, now it becomes in a higher state of entropy and it takes more information to describe the order of the deck. This is saying that on a 2 Qubit quantum computer, you're allowed to move away from the lower entropy initial state to a higher state of entropy but you're also allowed to move back towards the initial low entropy state. So it would be like shoveling the cards and returning to the initial state when you opened the cards.

So time travel was achieved on a very limited basis. In order to travel back in time, you would have to reverse entropy of the system back towards the initial state. I don't think that's possible for classical systems but it happened here. With a 2 Qubit quantum computer they had an 85% success rate and when they added a Qubit more errors occurred and the success rate dropped to 50%.

This result could also point to parallel universes. Let's go back to the cards example.

Let's say each shuffle of the deck of cards is like a quantum fluctuation. This fluctuation comes at a cost and it's paid with dark energy.

So now you're shuffling the cards but the probable states the cards can be in become separated by dark energy and they're now isolated systems (universes). So each isolated system would have a low entropy initial state but it wouldn't be a global initial state. So the isolated systems (universes) could never return to the global low entropy initial condition or the deck of cards out of the pack because now you have four 13 card isolated systems separated by dark energy or a gaziilion universes separated by dark energy but each universe is part of this initial whole. There was an article about this.

Aliens May Well Exist in a Parallel Universe, New Studies Find

According to a new pair of studies in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, there’s a decent chance that life-fostering planets could exist in a parallel universe — even if that universe were being torn apart by dark energy.

In the new study, researchers ran a massive computer simulation to build new universes under various starting conditions. They found that the conditions for life might be a little broader than previously thought — especially when it comes to the mysterious pull of dark energy.

Across several experiments, an international team of researchers from England, Australia and the Netherlands used a program called Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environmentsto simulate the birth, life and eventual death of various hypothetical universes. In each simulation, the researchers adjusted the amount of dark energy present in that universe, ranging from none to several hundred times the amount in our own universe.

The good news: Even in universes with 300 times as much dark energy as ours, life found a way.

"Our simulations showed that the accelerated expansion driven by dark energy has hardly any impact on the birth of stars, and hence places for life to arise," study co-author Pascal Elahi, a research fellow at the University of Western Australia, said in a statement. "Even increasing dark energy many hundreds of times might not be enough to make a dead universe."

That's good news for fans of extraterrestrial life and the multiverse theory. But a bigger question remains: If galaxies could still thrive on so much dark energy, why did our universe get handed such a seemingly small amount?

www.livescience.com...

Simple answer, FINE TUNING but that's another thread.

So the question becomes, what could have been the initial global low entropy state?

I would say a very likely candidate is a Highest dimension that would be like a Heaven so to speak.

Say there's 12 dimensions, this would mean each lower dimension is a holographic projection of the Highest dimension. This dimension would be eternal and like I said a Heaven so to speak. Here's an article on this that was in Scientific American.

Is the big bang, and all that came from it, a holographic mirage from another dimension?

The universe appears to us to exist in three dimensions of space and one of time—a geometry that we will refer to as the “three-dimensional universe.” In our scenario, this three dimensional universe is merely the shadow of a world with four spatial dimensions.

Specifically, our entire universe came into being during a stellar implosion in this suprauniverse, an implosion that created a three-dimensional shell around a four-dimensional black hole. Our universe is that shell.

www.researchgate.net...

So our universe would be the shadow of a higher dimension so of course if there's an end to how many dimensions are out there then the 11th or 12th or 5th dimension would be the highest dimension if that's where the dimensional limit ends. There could also be an infinity of higher dimensions and that would be another story.

What they managed to achieve is a time-reversed wave-packet. They reversed a quantum state using a complex conjugational algorithm and an IBM quantum computer.

They also showed that time reversal undergoes a sort of compression effect or "squeeze" as described by the paper. I wonder if this effect can be scaled up to see what the effects of artificial compression of time before inducing a reversal will do to space itself. As we know, space and time is really spacetime. If we can compress time as a singular effect it may also be possible to create a localized compression of space. If this sounds familiar it is because you've heard it before:

ntrs.nasa.gov...

and here:

ntrs.nasa.gov...

Didn't the "delayed choice, double slit experiment" already send information back in time?

originally posted by: 00018GE
Didn't the "delayed choice, double slit experiment" already send information back in time?

Or closed timelike curves, as well as a stack of retrocausality effects, offer the same thing?

Even reading a Feynman diagram in the wrong direction reveals that the arrow of time is just our limited perceptual kink, and not the truth of nature.

a reply to: neoholographic

This doesn't mean anyone will be going back in time anytime soon

But if we did according to this we would become our younger selves. 8)

a reply to: chr0naut

Well I had never heard of a Feynman diagram, thanks for pointing me down that fascinating trail.

a reply to: neoholographic

I have Always surmised that if Possible , Traveling Back in Time in our Present Universe would Actually take you back to a Past that Exists in a Parallel Universe because of the Law of Entropy . It just makes Sense to me .

Time Travel while Trump is on the White house..... Now that's a white rabbit if I've seen one.

Who else thinks this has some more "novel" applications? Like say, reversing lepton decay modes and such?

The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel into the past is impossible.

a reply to: projectvxn

It must be impossible, if those guys can't travel back in time and change the name of that "directorate"

How cheesy.

All I am reading is that they've devised an experiment to get a couple of qubits to return into their original state. No time travel is involved at all.

Also what they have is a tiny system of two or three qubits and the complexity of the "time reversal" grows polynomially.

a reply to: neoholographic

That's not a real time machine. A real time machine would have the ability to transport a human to another time in the past. These people probably have IQs over 150. Basically, they're so smart that they're dumb.

The universe simply *is*; there's no time component.

The concept of time was invented by humans to conceptualize existence in the past, present, and future. To illustrate: before you can acknowledge existence of the present, it ceases to exist because you're now in the new present--which likewise is gone faster than your brain can process the thought.

Time travel is little more than human wish-thinking brain activity. What these scientists are calling time travel is merely a change to the physical state of matter.


muSSang, this isn't Facebook. If you want to politicize a discussion on a non-political topic, that's where you do it. There's also the comments section in YouTube; plenty of people there to troll

Meanwhile, I can pull up files from 2010 on an old hard drive. Is that time travel too?
Being able to revert to a previous state is a really big stretch to claim it as being time travel.

sorry to rain on people's parade
www.technologyreview.com...

As Scott Aaronson, director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin, says, “If you’re simulating a time-reversible process on your computer, then you can ‘reverse the direction of time’ by simply reversing the direction of your simulation. From a quick look at the paper, I confess that I didn’t understand how this becomes more profound if the simulation is being done on IBM’s quantum computer.”

originally posted by: dubiousatworst
Meanwhile, I can pull up files from 2010 on an old hard drive. Is that time travel too?
Being able to revert to a previous state is a really big stretch to claim it as being time travel.

Try reversing wave packet entropy then we'll talk.

Edit:

They didn't just reverse a quantum state, they reversed entropic flow.

One thing this could be useful for is making Q programs and Q systems coherent. Coherency is a huge issue in quantum systems and its THE reason quantum computing isn't a widespread reality yet.

The other part, the one I'm interested in, is the squeezed-time effect before entropic reversal.

a reply to: dubiousatworst

Yeah, this guy clearly didnt understand the paper he was reading, but he sure as hell has an opinion of it.

This is why I stopped reading MIT Technology review. They're just as bad as the MSM sometimes.

I do agree that calling this a "time machine" is ridiculous as that is not what has taken place.

originally posted by: moebius
All I am reading is that they've devised an experiment to get a couple of qubits to return into their original state. No time travel is involved at all.

Also what they have is a tiny system of two or three qubits and the complexity of the "time reversal" grows polynomially.

This is a post that illustrates the problem.

Most people don't understand why this is time travel because they see time as some objective reality.

I heard one post actually confuse this with the warping of space so I will explain the difference.

When you warp space, you wouldn't be traveling through anything. You would just be connecting one point in space to another point in space. As soon as you "travel" then you run up against entropy.

Time travel isn't TRAVELING THROUGH ANYTHING CALLED TIME.

It's moving in a direction towards a lower entropy state.

We're talking about the arrow of time not any objective tick of time.

So 10 minutes ago the universe was in a lower entropy state then it is now. Even I cut my grass and decrease entropy locally the overall system (universe) will increase in entropy.

So in order for me to "travel" back to a lower entropy state 10 minutes ago, I would have to lower the entropy of the universe and that looks to be impossible.

In this experiment, they did something remarkable. They went back towards the direction of the initial low entropy state. They talk about pool balls but I talked about it in terms of cards.

The "time machine" described in the journal Scientific Reports consists of a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electron "qubits". A qubit is a unit of information described by a "one", a "zero", or a mixed "superposition" of both states.

In the experiment, an "evolution program" was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones. During this process, order was lost – just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue. But then another program modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved "backwards", from chaos to order.

Again, this is akin to opening a new deck of cards or setting up pool table balls on the table in an ordered way. You then break and the ordered cue balls scatter all over the pool table.

Now, you can get random configurations where the 5,6 and 7 cue ball look like they're in order on the table but what you will not expect to see is the cue balls returning to their initial state on the table.

It meant the state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point. Most laws of physics work both ways, in the future and the past. If you see a video of a pool ball knocking into another one, for instance, and then reverse that same video, the physical processes would both make sense and it would be impossible at the level of physics to know which way around would be correct.

But the universe does have one rule that goes only in one way: the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the progression from order to disorder. If you saw a video of someone breaking a perfectly arranged triangle of pool balls into a mess, for instance, then watching that backwards would obviously look nonsensical.

The new experiment is like giving the pool table such a perfectly calculated kick that the balls rolled back into an orderly pyramid.

www.sci-techuniverse.com...

A very simple explanation but people are confused because they're looking at time as some objective reality that you travel through and not ENTROPY.

a reply to: projectvxn

Thanks for the post but you're mixing two different things. The paper you posted is about warp drive.

This paper will begin with a short review of the Alcubierre warp drive metric and describes how the
phenomenon might work based on the original paper. The canonical form of the metric was developed
and published in [6] which provided key insight into the field potential and boost for the field which
remedied a critical paradox in the original Alcubierre concept of operations. A modified concept of
operations based on the canonical form of the metric that remedies the paradox is presented and
discussed. The idea of a warp drive in higher dimensional space-time (manifold) will then be briefly
considered by comparing the null-like geodesics of the Alcubierre metric to the Chung-Freese metric to
illustrate the mathematical role of hyperspace coordinates. The net effect of using a warp drive
“technology” coupled with conventional propulsion systems on an exploration mission will be discussed
using the nomenclature of early mission planning. Finally, an overview of the warp field interferometer
test bed being implemented in the Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory: Eagleworks (APPL:E) at the
Johnson Space Center will be detailed. While warp field mechanics has not had a “Chicago Pile” moment,
the tools necessary to detect a modest instance of the phenomenon are near at hand.

This is different. With warp drive you're not traveling anywhere. Space is being bent from point A to point B. You're just creating some kind of wormhole or bridge.

I'm not talking about a warp drive that bends space at a singular point in space. I'm talking about returning to the initial state which would require lowering the entropy of the universe.