Physicists Use Quantum Computer to Reverse Time

Time travel or going into past or future has been the dream of many. Russian and American scientists may have been able to do what was only in the realm of fiction.

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study is published in Scientific Reports.

Now we need to remember that, what these scientists have done is on a very minute scale.  And, it cannot be extrapolated to a larger scenario. Just one electron  “smeared out” over a fraction of a second spontaneously localizing into its recent past.  The probability of this happening is extremely low.  To a magnitude that is truly mind-boggling.

It turned out that even across the entire lifetime of the universe—13.7 billion years—observing 10 billion freshly localized electrons every second, the reverse evolution of the particle’s state would only happen once. And even then, the electron would travel no more than a mere one ten-billionth of a second into the past.

That is once in the life of this Universe kind of phenomenon.   How will it be useful?  Well, for one – it can help quantum computers become more precise and error-free.

Source: Phys.org