{"id":93670,"date":"2019-07-15T12:42:53","date_gmt":"2019-07-15T19:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/physicists-reverse-time-for-tiny-particles-inside-a-quantum-computer"},"modified":"2019-07-15T12:42:53","modified_gmt":"2019-07-15T19:42:53","slug":"physicists-reverse-time-for-tiny-particles-inside-a-quantum-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/physicists-reverse-time-for-tiny-particles-inside-a-quantum-computer","title":{"rendered":"Physicists Reverse Time for Tiny Particles Inside a Quantum Computer"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Time goes in one direction: forward. Little boys become old men but not vice versa; teacups shatter but never spontaneously reassemble. This cruel and immutable property of the universe, called the \u201carrow of time,\u201d<\/a> is fundamentally a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics<\/a>, which dictates that systems will always tend to become more disordered over time. But recently, researchers from the U.S. and Russia have bent that arrow just a bit \u2014 at least for subatomic particles.<\/p>\n

In the new study, published Tuesday (Mar. 12) in the journal Scientific Reports<\/a>, researchers manipulated the arrow of time using a very tiny quantum computer made of two quantum particles, known as qubits, that performed calculations. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings<\/a>]<\/p>\n

At the subatomic scale, where the odd rules of quantum mechanics<\/a> hold sway, physicists describe the state of systems through a mathematical construct called a wave function. This function is an expression of all the possible states the system could be in \u2014 even, in the case of a particle, all the possible locations it could be in \u2014 and the probability of the system being in any of those states at any given time. Generally, as time passes, wave functions spread out; a particle\u2019s possible location can be farther away if you wait an hour than if you wait 5 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Time goes in one direction: forward. Little boys become old men but not vice versa; teacups shatter but never spontaneously reassemble. This cruel and immutable property of the universe, called the \u201carrow of time,\u201d is fundamentally a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that systems will always tend to become more disordered [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,2229,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}