In the subatomic universe of quantum physics, you can achieve things considered impossible in our flesh-and-blood physical world. Things like superposition, entanglement, and eventeleportation all seem possible when things go quantum. Now, scientists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and University of Vienna are adding a kind of time travel to the list.
In a series of papers published throughout the past few years on preprint servers and in various online journals, researchers including ÖAW’s Miguel Navascués and University of Vienna’s Philip Walther explain the possibility of speeding up, slowing down, and even reversing the flow of time within a quantum system.
Navascués compares the phenomenon to different movie-watching experiences. “In a theater [classical physics], a movie is projected from beginning to end, regardless of what the audience wants,” he explains to the Spanish-language newspaper El País. “But at home [the quantum world], we have a remote control to manipulate the movie. We can rewind to a previous scene or skip several scenes ahead.”
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