Toggle light / dark theme

How Quantum Physicists ‘Flipped Time’ (and How They Didn’t)

“For the first time ever, we kind of have a time-traveling machine going in both directions,” said Sonja Franke-Arnold, a quantum physicist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who was not involved in the research.

Regrettably for science fiction fans, the devices have nothing in common with a 1982 DeLorean. Throughout the experiments, which were conducted by two independent teams in China and Austria, laboratory clocks continued to tick steadily forward. Only the photons flitting through the circuitry experienced temporal shenanigans. And even for the photons, researchers debate whether the flipping of time’s arrow is real or simulated.

Time travel might be possible using spinning lasers, according to a physicist

Physicist Ronald Mallett believes that a spinning laser loop can bend time, leading to time travel. He even has a prototype to test the idea.

Ronald Mallett is on a mission to develop a real-life working time machine.

But it will be hard because, according to what we know about physics now, time travel is impossible, even though it is often shown in science fiction.

Scientists Discovered How to Speed Up Time. Seriously

In the physical world, time marches in one direction, but things aren’t so straight forward in the quantum realm. Researchers have discovered that it’s possible to speed up, slow down, or reverse the flow of time in a quantum system. This isn’t exactly time travel, but is instead implementing or reverting to different quantum states from different points in time.

/* */