Now, hold on to your plutonium-proof underpants. This doesn’t mean we are going to the 24th and half century driving Mr. Fusion-powered DeLoreans. Their discovery shows that entangled quantum particles can travel into the future without actually being present during the time between now and the future.
Before, we knew that quantum teleportation works in space. Two identical particles at different locations are linked in such a way that, when you change the state of one, the other one instantly changes in exactly the same way, no matter how many miles or light-years are between them. This is a phenomenon that defies our understanding of reality, and it just got even more complex with this discovery.
University of Queensland’s scientists Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph claim that the quantum entanglement is a fundamental part of the universe, and it works both in space and time, so changing the state of particle today instantly changes the same particle in the future, even while the particle will not exist between those two points. This is how it works
(…) imagine an experiment that Ralph and Olson describe in which a qubit is sent into the future. The idea is that a detector acts on a qubit and then generates a classical message describing how this particle can be detected. Then, at some point in the future, another detector at the same position in space, receives this message and carries out the required measurement, thereby reconstructing the qubit.
But there’s a twist. Olson and Ralph show that the detection of the qubit in the future must be symmetric in time with its creation in the past. “If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisely a quarter past 12:00 in order to achieve entanglement,” they say. For that reason, they call this process “teleportation in time”.
How is this possible? If I knew, I wouldn’t be writing this article with a big headache. [Cornell University Library via MIT Technology Review]
P.Russell
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 4:22 PMthis universe is just so amazing…and also make me realise how little we know and helpless we are
Nodeity
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 4:40 PMUmmm,.. If you have to be in the exact place in space as you were when you sent the “qubit” given that the planet, the solar system, hell even the galaxy are constantly moving in time and space, How are you going to be able to find that place after a moderate period of time, say a week or a month ?? Oww, my brain just popped… dribbles and dies :)
Blake
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 5:58 PMHiro already discovered this.
matt
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 6:11 PMhuh… and yet they were bested by a slowly rising river…
James-Mac
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 7:24 PMnice.
mattpred
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 7:40 PMMight be more useful for Queensland if they discovered how to travel BACK in time, hey?
Oh geez, i’m Australian so I shouldn’t be condoning these insensitive comments. Haha. :(
matt
Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 12:44 AMdon’t feel bad, I live in Brisbane!
Sky Bolt
Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 1:53 AMA contrary opinion: qubits are slow and take (apparently) half an hour to transmit a message.
Latchland
Friday, January 21, 2011 at 9:58 AMThey claim? Isn’t that a bit of a broad statement. I can claim that my spit contains the cure to cancer but if i dont show some evidence and a thorough, almost insane knowledge of how, how can I expect people to believe it.
I’m all for science and I am completely amazed by the universe but I need to see some proof. Sorry.
If you want to get an idea of space / time travel, watch The Universe tv series, episodes titled – Space Travel (season 2 episode 8), and Light Speed (season 3, episode 3).
They gave me great restraint on jumping to conclusions about space / time travel.
Latchland
Saturday, January 22, 2011 at 9:11 AMI’ll just put this out there as the dumbest thing for u all to read but,
if i could go into the future and kill my future self, would that mean that when i get to that point in my life, another ‘me’ would come into the future and kill me?
How can two exact beings span time?
And if i did go into the future to say hello to myself does that mean he did the same thing when he was the same age?
BRAIN…. SWELLING…….. ‘SPLAT’!