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Russians invent PhoneWave (name subject to change)

protonion

Member
https://futurism.com/russian-scientist-quantum-computer-time/

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Russian scientists have apparently reversed the flow of time in an experiment they conducted on a quantum computer.
The finding is unlikely to lead to a time machine that would work on people. But the team of physicists managed to restore IBM’s public quantum computer to the state it had been in just a moment earlier, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Scientific Reports — a nuanced result, but one that could have striking implications for the future of computing, quantum physics, and our understanding of time itself.
“We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time,” Gordey Lesovik, a quantum physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology who led the research project, said in a university-published press release.
Great Scott
Lesovik’s team worked with scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois to run thousands of experiments on a quantum system programmed to reverse time’s arrow on a single electron.
After thousands of trials, the physicists managed to restore the quantum computer’s earlier state about 85 percent of the time, but only if they were working with a simplified, two-qubit system. A more complex quantum computer with three qubits was too chaotic, and the time reversal experiment only worked 49 percent of the time.
Just like research into quantum teleportation has nothing to do with transporting people, there’s no reason to link this study to the notion of a machine that could travel through time. Rather, the scientists hope that their work can help quantum computer scientists make sure their software is actually doing what it’s supposed to by kicking it back through time and double checking its work.
 

Grinchy

Banned
You know what would be sweet is if a quantum computer could execute a command or calculation in the past. So maybe you'd attempt to use the calculator, but the result would already be on the screen because you actually typed in what you wanted to know and it calculated and then displayed it in the past. So as far as you're concerned, you never even typed anything in. Pass the blunt!
 

bitbydeath

Member
You know what would be sweet is if a quantum computer could execute a command or calculation in the past. So maybe you'd attempt to use the calculator, but the result would already be on the screen because you actually typed in what you wanted to know and it calculated and then displayed it in the past. So as far as you're concerned, you never even typed anything in. Pass the blunt!

You could shit post without lifting a finger.
 
I don't understand shit. Am I the only one? What does that mean?

It means that they can reverse entropy at a quantum level. Entropy is intermingled with time - basically, the universe will always stay the same or become more "chaotic" over time. More particles will be generated, things will break, organization will break down, things will cool, etc.
 

Scopa

The Tribe Has Spoken
What if John Titor was for real?
Wasn’t he supposedly looking for an IBM PC?

SvZ9sGQ.gif
 
You know what would be sweet is if a quantum computer could execute a command or calculation in the past. So maybe you'd attempt to use the calculator, but the result would already be on the screen because you actually typed in what you wanted to know and it calculated and then displayed it in the past. So as far as you're concerned, you never even typed anything in. Pass the blunt!
Connect it to a large screen and get a large feed, a feed of numbers can be converted into colors sounds touch 3d etc.


actually time travel without causality is probably the biggest nightmare in existence. Thankfully it is all but impossible.
 
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God Enel

Member
It means that they can reverse entropy at a quantum level. Entropy is intermingled with time - basically, the universe will always stay the same or become more "chaotic" over time. More particles will be generated, things will break, organization will break down, things will cool, etc.

????
 
Remember when you used to read about American scientists doing things like that? When did we start outsourcing our impossible feats of crazy science?
 
Remember when you used to read about American scientists doing things like that? When did we start outsourcing our impossible feats of crazy science?
If you follow this link you'll see that it was "Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland..." ;)

What if John Titor was for real?

What do you mean "what if"?!?
 

Greedings

Member
There's no such journal as "Nature Scientific Reports."

There's Scientific Reports, and there's Nature. I hate it when people try to act like their crappy research published in scientific repots is some how equivalent to Nature.
 

Thurible

Member
It means that they can reverse entropy at a quantum level. Entropy is intermingled with time - basically, the universe will always stay the same or become more "chaotic" over time. More particles will be generated, things will break, organization will break down, things will cool, etc.

I find that difficult to believe. Preventing the inevitable heat death through time travel does not seem feasible just because this experiment succeeded. No offense, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to come to this conclusion. We don't know if it is possible to use it in such a way. There are many unknown factors at play here. I also doubt humanity would live that long to put what you suggest into reality. Entropy takes a long time.

I'm curious, if a form of "time travel" is indeed possible, I would like to know how it operates. There are many theories on how it would work, often depicted in science fiction and fantasy. Would time travel violate causality? Could you kill your grandfather? Are things predestined to fate, or does free will triumph? I always believed this was more of a fun thought experiment, but perhaps there is reality to it. If this computation experiment is possible, perhaps endeavors on a human scale would work.


What don't you understand, friend? He was suggesting that through time travel it is possible to reverse the flow of entropy and thus create a state of universal immortality without degradation and heat death (though I could have misinterpreted what he meant, and if so I apologize).
 

Shifty

Member
Intriguing. Source control systems could be a thing of the past if we could simply rewind the state of folders on our hard drives :messenger_squinting_tongue:
 

Fbh

Member
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The customer can't complain about annoying marketing calls and texts if we technically haven't made them yet.
 
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Mr Nash

square pies = communism
So when they say they're reversing the arrow of time, do they mean they're reversing entropy or actually going back in time? I'm a physics noob so my understanding is super limited. Is it possible to restore something from entropy while still going forward in time?
 
I find that difficult to believe. Preventing the inevitable heat death through time travel does not seem feasible just because this experiment succeeded. No offense, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to come to this conclusion. We don't know if it is possible to use it in such a way. There are many unknown factors at play here. I also doubt humanity would live that long to put what you suggest into reality. Entropy takes a long time.

I'm curious, if a form of "time travel" is indeed possible, I would like to know how it operates. There are many theories on how it would work, often depicted in science fiction and fantasy. Would time travel violate causality? Could you kill your grandfather? Are things predestined to fate, or does free will triumph? I always believed this was more of a fun thought experiment, but perhaps there is reality to it. If this computation experiment is possible, perhaps endeavors on a human scale would work.



What don't you understand, friend? He was suggesting that through time travel it is possible to reverse the flow of entropy and thus create a state of universal immortality without degradation and heat death (though I could have misinterpreted what he meant, and if so I apologize).

I'm basing what I said of of their description of what they did and the system they did it to. It would be with regards to entropy because entropy is the thermodynamic measure of time. If a system with more variables is more difficult to revert, that also points to entropy because entropy is purely stochastic - there are a smaller number of organized states than disorganized states, so if they are somehow choosing a low probability state it would be easier to choose one with fewer variables.
 
So when they say they're reversing the arrow of time, do they mean they're reversing entropy or actually going back in time? I'm a physics noob so my understanding is super limited. Is it possible to restore something from entropy while still going forward in time?

This is a classic example of how entropy works.

Imagine a two boxes side-by-side with one (Box A) filled with N gas particles, the other (Box B) in vacuum, and a closed valved connection between them. Let's say you open the valve and allow the gas to flow to Box B. How likely is it that all the gas particles will ever be simultaneously in Box A again? Under an assumption of random motion and uniform distribution by volume, each particle has a 50% chance of being in Box A, so there is exactly one state out of 2^N where all the particles are in Box A. To reach this low probability state (which gets lower as N increases) requires a negative entropy, which (by thermodynamics) requires some mechanism to counteract by increasing the entropy of the environment.
 
But isnt the lack of communication from the future already kinda proof time travel never happens?

im sure i got that idea from tv or a movie
 

iconmaster

Banned
You know what would be sweet is if a quantum computer could execute a command or calculation in the past. So maybe you'd attempt to use the calculator, but the result would already be on the screen because you actually typed in what you wanted to know and it calculated and then displayed it in the past. So as far as you're concerned, you never even typed anything in. Pass the blunt!

 
It means that they can reverse entropy at a quantum level. Entropy is intermingled with time - basically, the universe will always stay the same or become more "chaotic" over time. More particles will be generated, things will break, organization will break down, things will cool, etc.
Is entropy really a component of time? Or is entropy just a metric we can use to perceive the flow of time?
 
I'm curious, if a form of "time travel" is indeed possible, I would like to know how it operates. There are many theories on how it would work, often depicted in science fiction and fantasy. Would time travel violate causality? Could you kill your grandfather? Are things predestined to fate, or does free will triumph? I always believed this was more of a fun thought experiment, but perhaps there is reality to it. If this computation experiment is possible, perhaps endeavors on a human scale would work.

My guess is if it's possible then it works like the John Titor stories where you are not traveling back in "time" per se so much as traveling to an alternate dimension's past, which may heavily resemble your own timeline, but if you were to change anything you wouldn't be rewriting your "own" history but that of another dimension, so no paradoxes.
 
It means that they can reverse entropy at a quantum level. Entropy is intermingled with time - basically, the universe will always stay the same or become more "chaotic" over time. More particles will be generated, things will break, organization will break down, things will cool, etc.

Actually N.Trophy worked with Uka Uka to make a time machine to grab the crystals and finally get rid of that damn Bandicoot.
 

Thurible

Member
I'm basing what I said of of their description of what they did and the system they did it to. It would be with regards to entropy because entropy is the thermodynamic measure of time. If a system with more variables is more difficult to revert, that also points to entropy because entropy is purely stochastic - there are a smaller number of organized states than disorganized states, so if they are somehow choosing a low probability state it would be easier to choose one with fewer variables.
As you can probably tell, I'm not very educated on this particular subject. My understanding of entropy comes from the simple idea of a linear decay. Eventually everything breaks down down to the last particulate, and what only remains is energy. This process however takes practically an eternity in a human perspective. The heat death of the universe will take an amount of time that is beyond human comprehension. I have several doubts that this experiment on quantum computation can be used for legitament time travel, especially since we know so little about it currently. I also feel that using said process to halt the flow of natural decay is improbable, if not because nothing like that has ever been done before. For human beings to change how the universe in which we reside acts and reacts sounds absolutely fantastic. Perhaps time's linear flow is simply a device living beings like humans use to understand the world around them in a coherent manner, but I am not sure if this is the case that time doesn't just move forward. Perhaps there are many complex mechanisms that govern our physical reality that we simply deem as a linearity. Please excuse my ignorance on the matter, I admit I am likely far less knoweledgeable on this area than you, I haven't been educated on this subject truly, and I wish to understand more.

Let me ask you a few questions, if I may. I have read an article linked to the OP's on the matter and I have difficulty understanding somethings.

"The researchers then attempted to reverse time in a four-stage experiment. Instead of an electron, they observed the state of a quantum computer made of two and later three basic elements called superconducting qubits.

Stage 1: Order. Each qubit is initialized in the ground state, denoted as zero. This highly ordered configuration corresponds to an electron localized in a small region, or a rack of billiard balls before the break.

Stage 2: Degradation. The order is lost. Just like the electron is smeared out over an increasingly large region of space, or the rack is broken on the pool table, the state of the qubits becomes an ever more complex changing pattern of zeros and ones. This is achieved by briefly launching the evolution program on the quantum computer. Actually, a similar degradation would occur by itself due to interactions with the environment. However, the controlled program of autonomous evolution will enable the last stage of the experiment.

Stage 3: Time reversal. A special program modifies the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it would then evolve "backwards," from chaos toward order. This operation is akin to the random microwave background fluctuation in the case of the electron, but this time it is deliberately induced. An obviously far-fetched analogy for the billiards example would be someone giving the table a perfectly calculated kick.

Stage 4: Regeneration. The evolution program from the second stage is launched again. Provided that the "kick" has been delivered successfully, the program does not result in more chaos but rather rewinds the state of the qubits back into the past, the way a smeared electron would be localized or the billiard balls would retrace their trajectories in reverse playback, eventually forming a triangle.

The researchers found that in 85 percent of the cases the two-qubit quantum computer indeed returned back into the initial state. When three qubits were involved, more errors happened, resulting in a roughly 50 percent success rate. According to the authors, these errors are due to imperfections in the actual quantum computer. As more sophisticated devices are designed, the error rate is expected to drop."

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-03/miop-prt031119.php

So is this experiment about removing the uncertainty behind the time and space of an electron using a quantum computer? What exactly is happening here? Is time truly being reversed, or is it simply the state of the electron being brought to its original order? What exactly is the program doing that "time travels" the electron?

My guess is if it's possible then it works like the John Titor stories where you are not traveling back in "time" per se so much as traveling to an alternate dimension's past, which may heavily resemble your own timeline, but if you were to change anything you wouldn't be rewriting your "own" history but that of another dimension, so no paradoxes.
Reminds me of back to the future when Doc Brown explains time travel with the chalkboard by stating that Marty makes and travels through different timelines.
 
So is this experiment about removing the uncertainty behind the time and space of an electron using a quantum computer? What exactly is happening here? Is time truly being reversed, or is it simply the state of the electron being brought to its original order? What exactly is the program doing that "time travels" the electron?

To be honest, I am not familiar enough with a quantum computer to say what exactly was occurring, but basically every system revolves around increasing entropy. In a regular electron-current driven computer, current flows from high electric potential to low electrical potential within the circuit, and that increases entropy by putting those electrons in a lower energetic state. This is analogous to the gas filling both containers - potential lower energy states are more "numerous" than high energy states. The same thing applies with chemical equilibria, transition states, etc.

By reversing this in larger situations, they could make electrons flow from low electric potential to high electric potential (basically restoring the source of the potential difference), or make combustion go in reverse, make matter repel matter rather than attract it, etc. If this is real, they have made a probability engine, or maybe an entropy pump, that makes normally rare outcomes more common.

If I had to guess, at a quantum level they are probably still increasing the overall entropy of the universe - the negative entropy generated within this system is probably being countered by increased entropy in the equipment.
 
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