Africa-Press – Rwanda. The possibility of time travel – the concept of movement between certain points in time – has long captivated the minds of both scientists and science fiction writers alike. Scientific theories about time travel abound, interspersed with terms like wormholes, black holes, and space-time warp.
“We have made science fiction come true,” a collaboration of scientists has announced, claiming they have discovered a trick to speed up time.
“It’s possible to “accelerate, decelerate and reverse the flow of time within arbitrary, even uncontrolled quantum systems,” Spanish researchers Miguel Navascués and David Trillo, from the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), along with Austrian researcher Philip Walther, and the University of Vienna’s experimental physics group have discovered.
The scientists have revealed in a spate of papers published on preprint servers that quantum particles – the smallest physical particle that can exist without being broken down – can be rejuvenated or reverted to a previous state.
Developed by scientists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a “rewind protocol” enables any particle, such as an electron or proton, to revert to different quantum states from different points in time. David Trillo proved this, both in theory and experimentally, by using a photon that evolves while passing through a crystal. A “quantum switch” experimental device was used to allow a photon of light to revert to its previous state.
They pointed out that unlike earlier discovered protocols that offered a certain “probability level,” the new mechanism can be relied upon to always prove successful, unless the experimental device is totally “invisible” to the qubit – the basic unit of quantum information in quantum computing.
As to whether one could replicate this experiment with a human, the team explained it would be practically impossible.
The finding isn’t a time machine, the scientists emphasized.
This finding, according to one of the researchers, Philip Walther, has practical implications, as he said that it could have “technological applications,” such as a “rewind protocol in quantum processors used to reverse unwanted errors or developments.”
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