Ryan wills/istock/Amtitus
When Seth Lloyd published his ideas about quantum time loops, he did not consider all the implications. For one thing, he didn’t anticipate the many emails the time travelers would receive asking for his help. If he had the time again, jokingly, “he probably wouldn’t do it”.
Unfortunately, Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will not see the past years again. Spoiler alert: No one will go back in time during this article. But particles? That is another matter.
Physicists have long proposed theoretical routes to the past called the time loop. But since they are impractical and full of paradoxes, they have been considered impossible for a long time. But now Lloyd and other physicists are beginning to show that such loops to the past in the quantum field are not only possible, but also experimentally feasible. In other words, we will soon be trying to effectively send a particle back in time.
If this succeeds, it raises the possibility that people, if not humans, could send messages in the form of quantum signals back in time. More importantly, studying this phenomenon also leads us to a successor theory that better captures how cause and effect actually work, what quantum theory means, and perhaps how we can create the true nature of reality.
In physics, time loops are aptly known closed time-like curves (CTCs). They were created in the first year Albert Einstein’s the theory of general relativity…
