Hisham Sarwar
Remember the 80’s blockbuster movie ‘Back To The Future’?. It all seemed unreal 4 decades back but now a recent study has shown that reversing the direction of time is possible through Quantum computers. This happened when the researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with the colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland to return the state of a quantum computer of a fraction of a second into past. By using electrons and the world of quantum mechanics researchers are able to turn the time back in an experiment.
The event would appear to anyone watching the computer as time has reversed. According to the head of the Laboratory of Quantum Information Dr Gordey Lesovik, scientists have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.
The time machine consists of a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electrons. For the experiment, an evolution program was launched that squeezed the qubits in order to become a complex changing pattern of zeros and ones. As the process proceeded, the order of the qubits was lost when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue.
The state of the quantum computer was modified by another program in such a manner that it evolved backward. During this process, the state of the qubits was renowned back to the original starting point. There are so many laws of Physics that work both in the future and the past. if you are able to see a video of pool balls knocking into one another and then reverse that same video. The physical processes would start to make sense.
But the universe has only one rule i.e. the second law of thermodynamics. It describes the progression from order to disorder. The scientists reveal that working with just two qubits, time reversal was achieved with a success rate of 85 percent. More errors occurred when three qubits were studied and resulted in a 50 percent success rate.
When the scientists improved the sophistication of the devices used, the error rate is expected to drop. In the development of quantum computers, this experiment could have a practical application. As Dr Lesovik describes that the algorithm could be updated and used to test programs that are written for quantum computer and will eliminate noise and errors.
This article originally appeared on Independent.co.uk
