Physicists at University of Queensland, Australia have simulated time travel using particles of light. The researchers achieved this by simulating the behavior of a single piece of light -- a particle of energy -- traveling on a closed timelike curve (CTC) -- a closed path in space-time. The work may help to understand the longstanding problem of how time-travel could be possible in the quantum world and how the theory of quantum mechanics might change in the presence of closed timelike curves.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @01:38AM
A hundred years after you were born a war started. Will start. This is not a war for land or wealth, this is a war for everything. Time travel is Pandora's box, Kiera. Shortly after you left your time, the technology found its way into the hands of criminals, who saw only opportunity. It's a popular strategy... going back in time for selfish reasons. Laws were passed and the technology was confiscated. But some damage had already been done. The only way to prevent these abuses was to put in place a safety net that was built around an idea. A common desire to protect history.
(Score: 1) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:05AM
Everything of material value is already in the hands of criminals.
This is not proof of your statements, but could be used to corroborate what you claim, when other factual evidence is supplied.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Oligonicella on Tuesday June 24 2014, @01:53AM
First, we assume a spherical cow. Math can be made to simulate anything at all with the proper assumptions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @02:07AM
Spherical cows are so damn sexy. Let's get a cylindrical bull over here and shoot some porn! Aw yeah.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday June 24 2014, @02:59AM
That's utter stupidity.
A sphere is the least efficient shape, unless our bovine delivery system involves trajectories and drag. You sound like a weapons designer, or terrorist.
CUBIC cows, OTOH, is where things get interesting. Stackable Steak Systems. Far more efficient and better able to meet the demands of a meat hungry future.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @03:11AM
I cut my hand on the edge of your cube steak! Mc3's Restaurants, prepare to be sued.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 24 2014, @06:36AM
Torus* shit! Spherical cows guarantee the maximum steak with the minimum cowhide.
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* (alt spelling: Taurus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @02:21AM
this geek is greek to me
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Tuesday June 24 2014, @06:42AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:31AM
What?
Add back the hyphens that were removed, et voila:
Also I think the headline's a bit overstated. They didn't simulate time travel with light - they simulated time-travelling light. It sounds like it was all done with maths, so no actual light was harmed during this experiement.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @08:13AM
Any such simulation won't tell us anything of how a photon would really behave when traveling to the past, since we simply don't have experimental data for that. There are at least two competing ideas of how closed timelike curves might work, and I'm sure there are some possibilities no one has ever thought of.
All this of course doesn't affect the fact that we have no evidence so far that time travel is actually possible at all. Yes, you can write down solutions of General Relativity which involve closed timelike curves. But this doesn't mean those solutions correspond to anything possible in the real world. Inside worm holes there are such extreme conditions that I'm sure you'd need quantum gravity to correctly describe it; however quantum gravity might well reveal that there are no worm holes. Before we have a successful theory of quantum gravitation, we can't say for sure whether it will support time travel. And if quantum gravity will allow time travel, I'm sure it also will answer the question what happens to time-travelling photons.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday June 24 2014, @01:46PM
why ac? that was a nice comment!
A potential problem with all time-travel technologies is feedback. Any energy sent from the future to the past, would cause the past to start "heating up"? It might be possible this happens all the time with the "tiny wormwholes" and perhaps the limit to the size is small for this reason?
Mind blowing stuff!!
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:40PM
Well, if you start heating up, just send the excess heat into the past! Problem solved, right? ;-)
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 1) by martyb on Tuesday June 24 2014, @12:08PM
Thanks for pointing that out! It is a known problem with the current version of slashcode that — named character entities (among others) get stripped from submissions. It is anticipated that the UTF-8 support being developed for the next release of the site software will correct this.
I have updated the story to include the missing dashes.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @12:40PM
Missing unicode support doesn't necessitate removing HTML entities which consist of pure ASCII and are interpreted by the web browser — and thus work quite fine as my use of the corresponding numeric entity for the very same character here in this post proves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @12:23PM
You are correct. I should have explained more clearly, and for that I apologize.
These named character entity filters were in the original slash code from which we built this site. We discovered these filters in the course of implementing full UTF-8 support. At a user level, these seem to be disjoint. There is, however, a relationship in that both pertain to what is stored in the database and what is displayed on the site. We are investigating these relationships and implementing both as part of the UTF-8 implementation.
It is our hope that all of this will appear in the next update to the site.