The article, which is largely a summary of the concepts involved, can be found here:
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015...-possible/
I'm surprised more wasn't made of this at the time - the article dates from December 2015.
The abstract of the article published in a subsidiary of Nature:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140619...s5145.html
And a longer discussion of the concepts in Scientific American, indicating how the grandfather paradox is resolvable at quantum levels (predating the experiment by one year):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...r-paradox/
The guts of it:
* CTC = Closed timelike curve. Our best physical theories seem to contain no prohibitions on traveling backward through time. The feat should be possible based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of spacetime by energy and matter. An extremely powerful gravitational field, such as that produced by a spinning black hole, could in principle profoundly warp the fabric of existence so that spacetime bends back on itself. This would create a "closed timelike curve," or CTC, a loop that could be traversed to travel back in time. Hawking and other cheerless physicists hate the idea of CTCs because in such loops the rules of cause and effect break down.
This is an intriguing proof of the concept in quantum terms, because it continues the idea that quantum mechanics are literally a field where different rules apply, where everything is a matter of probability rather than deterministic events.
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015...-possible/
I'm surprised more wasn't made of this at the time - the article dates from December 2015.
The abstract of the article published in a subsidiary of Nature:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140619...s5145.html
And a longer discussion of the concepts in Scientific American, indicating how the grandfather paradox is resolvable at quantum levels (predating the experiment by one year):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...r-paradox/
The guts of it:
Quote:Quote:
Deutsch's quantum solution to the grandfather paradox works something like this:
Instead of a human being traversing a CTC* to kill her ancestor, imagine that a fundamental particle goes back in time to flip a switch on the particle-generating machine that created it. If the particle flips the switch, the machine emits a particle—the particle—back into the CTC; if the switch isn't flipped, the machine emits nothing. In this scenario there is no a priori deterministic certainty to the particle's emission, only a distribution of probabilities.
Deutsch's insight was to postulate self-consistency in the quantum realm, to insist that any particle entering one end of a CTC must emerge at the other end with identical properties. Therefore, a particle emitted by the machine with a probability of one half would enter the CTC and come out the other end to flip the switch with a probability of one half, imbuing itself at birth with a probability of one half of going back to flip the switch. If the particle were a person, she would be born with a one-half probability of killing her grandfather, giving her grandfather a one-half probability of escaping death at her hands—good enough in probabilistic terms to close the causative loop and escape the paradox. Strange though it may be, this solution is in keeping with the known laws of quantum mechanics.
* CTC = Closed timelike curve. Our best physical theories seem to contain no prohibitions on traveling backward through time. The feat should be possible based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of spacetime by energy and matter. An extremely powerful gravitational field, such as that produced by a spinning black hole, could in principle profoundly warp the fabric of existence so that spacetime bends back on itself. This would create a "closed timelike curve," or CTC, a loop that could be traversed to travel back in time. Hawking and other cheerless physicists hate the idea of CTCs because in such loops the rules of cause and effect break down.
This is an intriguing proof of the concept in quantum terms, because it continues the idea that quantum mechanics are literally a field where different rules apply, where everything is a matter of probability rather than deterministic events.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm