Scientists Have Discovered A Way To Reverse Time – And Possibly Erase Mistakes

In a stunning breakthrough that sounds like science fiction, researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the University of Vienna have discovered a method to reverse time at least within the strange and surreal world of quantum physics. Their work, published in journals such as Optica, Quantum, and the arXiv preprint server, examines how particles such as photons can be manipulated to move both forward and backward in time.

This is like having a remote control on time, says physicist Miguel Navascues. In classical physics, it is like a movie in a theater; you cannot rearrange it. However, in the quantum realm, it is as though you are watching at home; you can rewind, fast-forward, and skip scenes, he told El Pais.

The team was able to evolve a single photon as it traveled through a crystal, then revert it back to its previous state, effectively rewinding it in time using a device known as a quantum switch. This is what they call time translation, which is not about reversals. It is not time travel in the science-fiction meaning of the word, as in the movie Back to the Future when the protagonists jump into a DeLorean, but a method of restoring or altering the state of quantum particles without necessitating the observation or complete comprehension of the evolution of the quantum particles.

And the ruse is reciprocal. The researchers also found how to accelerate the time of a particle. By redistributing time from other systems “stealing” a year each from nine and giving all of them to the tenth, they accelerated one system’s evolution by a decade in just a year.

However, human time travel is not coming any time soon. It would take millions of years of quantum computing to rewind even one second of human existence because the amount of data is enormous.

Nonetheless, this development has massive potential in quantum computing. The reversibility of errors and the precision of controlling quantum states may transform the way we construct and operate quantum processors.

Ultimately, it is not only about time travel but also about the second chance, at least in the quantum world. And suppose life had a rewind button, would you not press it?