They do damage to science as a whole by convincing the public that science is so bewildering it’s beyond their comprehension. Wild headlines don’t just give quantum computing a bad name. They certainly didn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics or the laws of physics.” He added: “This is the type of hype that is going to give quantum computing a bad name.” One, who did not wish to be named, said: “I don’t know how useful this is … it doesn’t mean that these guys made a time machine. Other quantum computing experts we spoke to agreed. From a quick look at the paper, I confess that I didn’t understand how this becomes more profound if the simulation is being done on IBM’s quantum computer.” But it’s a lot less interesting than a time machine.Īs Scott Aaronson, director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin, says, “If you’re simulating a time-reversible process on your computer, then you can ‘reverse the direction of time’ by simply reversing the direction of your simulation. The authors of the paper, from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and ETH Zurich, say their technique might be useful for testing quantum programs.
A lens can be used to focus light-“reversing” the dispersal of light that had gone out of focus. It might let you see things-like steam flowing back into a tea kettle or Humpty Dumpty spontaneously assembling from a jumble of broken pieces-that appear to “reverse the arrow of time.” The paper in question describes a quantum-computing version of such a video running in reverse.Ī closer analogy is a lens, like what one would find in a telescope, a microscope, or eyeglasses. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s kind of neat. That “reverses the flow of time,” in a way. So if they didn’t invent time travel, what did these scientists actually do? And if you really want to get into the weeds on the physics of time travel, try here.) (For a fun and sad exploration of how strange reversing the flow of time would make things, check out Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis. This is a law both of physics and of common sense. Things look different going forward in time from how they would were time reversed-in a number of different ways, among them that entropy (very loosely speaking, a measure of disorder) increases. You can run the video in either direction and it still seems physically plausible. Or think of two billiard balls colliding. “Reverse” time and instead the Earth will travel in a counterclockwise orbit. Look at that system going forward in time, and the Earth orbits in a clockwise direction. Think of an idealized version of the Earth orbiting the sun, where each is a perfect sphere.
Some simple physical models are symmetric in time. If you had difficulty understanding how scientists accomplished such a counterintuitive feat, don’t worry.
0 kommentar(er)
