The possibility of time travel by optical methods has been refuted by scientists from Hong Kong. However, there still remains the hypothetical possibility of creating a time machine using supergravity regions, like those of black holes or "wormholes".
One hypothetical way to travel through time is to travel at or above the speed of light. Despite one of the fundamental statements of Einstein's theory of relativity, which is the impossibility of achieving speeds greater than the speed of light, over the past ten years a discussion has unfolded in the scientific community, the essence of which is that single photons can be "superluminal".
Proving the existence of such photons would mean the theoretical possibility of time travel, since these photons would violate the principle of causality.
This principle in classical physics means the following: any event that occurred at time t 1 can affect the event that occurred at time t 2 only if t 1 is less than t 2 . In the theory of relativity, this principle is formulated in a similar way, only the conditions associated with relativistic effects are added to it, due to which time depends on the chosen frame of reference.
The reason for resuming the discussion about the existence of "superluminal" photons appeared in January 2010. Then an article by American scientists was published in the Optic Express magazine, which was described by the science department of Gazeta.Ru. In their experiment, the researchers passed photons through a stack of materials of various nature.
By alternating layers of high and low refractive indices, the scientists observed that individual photons traveled through a 2.5 micron thick plate at what seemed to be superluminal speeds.
The authors of the work tried to explain this phenomenon from the standpoint of the corpuscular-wave nature of light (after all, light is both a wave and a stream of particle-photons at the same time) without violating the theory of relativity, arguing that the observed speed is some kind of illusion. In the experiment, light both starts and ends its journey as a photon. When one of these photons crosses the boundary between layers of material, on each surface it creates a wave - an optical precursor-precursor (for clarity, you can compare the optical precursor with an air wave that occurs in front of a moving train). These waves interact with each other, creating an interference pattern: that is, the wave intensities are redistributed, creating a pattern of clear maxima and minima, just as a tidal layer is formed in the ocean with oncoming waves - water uplift. At a certain arrangement of the H- and L-layers, the interference of waves causes the effect of "early arrival" of a part of the photons. But other photons, on the contrary, arrive noticeably later than usual due to the appearance of interference minima in the picture. To correctly detect the speed, you need to register all the photons passing through the layers, then averaging will give the usual speed of light.
To confirm this explanation, it was necessary to make observations of a single photon and its optical precursor.
The corresponding experiment was set up by a group of scientists headed by Professor Du Chengwang of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
In their experiment, the researchers created a pair of photons, after which one of them was sent to a medium consisting of rubidium atoms cooled to low temperatures. By creating the effect of electromagnetically induced transparency (where a medium that absorbs radiation becomes transparent when an appropriate field is applied to it), Du and colleagues successfully measured the speeds of both the photon itself and its optical precursor. “Our results show that the principle of causality holds for individual photons,” the abstract says. article published in Physical Review Letters.
Thus, this work put an end to the scientific discussion about whether there can be separate "superluminal" photons.
In addition, the experiment of Hong Kong scientists is important for the development of quantum optics, a better understanding of the mechanism of quantum transitions and, in general, some principles of physics.
Well, people who dream of traveling back in time should not despair.
Violation of the principle of causality by individual photons was not the only hypothetical possibility for creating a time machine.
In an interview Toronto Star Du Chengwang stated:
“Time travel based on photons or optical methods is not possible, but we cannot rule out other possibilities such as black holes or "wormholes".
One hypothetical way to travel through time is to travel at or above the speed of light. Despite one of the fundamental statements of Einstein's theory of relativity, which is the impossibility of achieving speeds greater than the speed of light, over the past ten years, a discussion has unfolded in the scientific community, the essence of which is that single photons can be "superluminal".
Proving the existence of such photons would mean the theoretical possibility of time travel, since these photons would violate the principle of causality.
This principle in classical physics means the following: any event that occurred at time t 1 can affect the event that occurred at time t 2 only if t 1 is less than t 2 . In the theory of relativity, this principle is formulated in a similar way, only the conditions associated with relativistic effects are added to it, due to which time depends on the chosen frame of reference.
The reason for resuming the discussion about the existence of "superluminal" photons appeared in January 2010. Then an article by American scientists was published in the Optic Express magazine, which was described by the science department of Gazeta.Ru. In their experiment, the researchers passed photons through a stack of materials of various nature.
By alternating layers of high and low refractive indices, the scientists observed that individual photons traveled through a 2.5 micron thick plate at what seemed to be superluminal speeds.
The authors of the work tried to explain this phenomenon from the standpoint of the corpuscular-wave nature of light (after all, light is both a wave and a stream of particle-photons at the same time) without violating the theory of relativity, arguing that the observed speed is some kind of illusion. In the experiment, light both starts and ends its journey as a photon. When one of these photons crosses the boundary between layers of material, it creates a wave on each surface - an optical precursor-precursor (for clarity, you can compare the optical precursor with an air wave that occurs in front of a moving train). These waves interact with each other, creating an interference pattern: that is, the wave intensities are redistributed, creating a pattern of clear maxima and minima, just as a tidal layer is formed in the ocean with oncoming waves - water uplift. At a certain arrangement of the H- and L-layers, the interference of waves causes the effect of "early arrival" of a part of the photons. But other photons, on the contrary, arrive noticeably later than usual due to the appearance of interference minima in the picture. To correctly detect the speed, you need to register all the photons passing through the layers, then averaging will give the usual speed of light.
To confirm this explanation, it was necessary to make observations of a single photon and its optical precursor.
The corresponding experiment was set up by a group of scientists headed by Professor Du Chengwang of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
In their experiment, the researchers created a pair of photons, after which one of them was sent to a medium consisting of rubidium atoms cooled to low temperatures. By creating an electromagnetically induced transparency effect (where a medium that absorbs radiation becomes transparent when an appropriate field is applied to it), Du and colleagues have successfully measured the velocities of both the photon itself and its optical precursor. “Our results show that the principle of causality is satisfied for individual photons,” the abstract says. article published in Physical Review Letters.
Thus, this work put an end to the scientific discussion about whether there can be separate "superluminal" photons.
In addition, the experiment of Hong Kong scientists is important for the development of quantum optics, a better understanding of the mechanism of quantum transitions and, in general, some principles of physics.
Well, people who dream of traveling back in time should not despair.
Violation of the principle of causality by individual photons was not the only hypothetical possibility for creating a time machine.
In an interview Toronto Star Du Chengwang stated:“Time travel based on photons or optical methods is not possible, but we cannot rule out other possibilities such as black holes or "wormholes".
When Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a fuss during Code Code 2016, declaring a high probability that humanity exists inside an artificial, virtual universe, the public reacted very strongly. Fans of The Matrix were delighted, while others were horrified. Alas, new research has shown that there is no supercomputer supporting the existence of millions of people in a simulation of reality, and there cannot be. It's not about philosophy or a special way of looking at life - just the bare facts.
Is The Matrix a lie?
A recent study by theoretical physicists at the University of Oxford, which was published in the journal Scientific Advances just last week, finally confirms that life and reality are not products of computer simulations. Researchers led by Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhi came to this conclusion after noticing a new connection between gravitational anomalies and the complexity of quantum computing.
Proponents of a simulated universe theory, such as Musk himself and the popular astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, often point to the ever-increasing capabilities of modern computer systems as evidence that reality can be emulated. In concept simulated universe, which became popular thanks to the British philosopher Nick Bostrom back in 2003, it is likely that in the hypothetical future, highly developed civilizations will develop realistic virtual simulations that create the illusion of past eras. For us, this “past” is quite real, and it would be appropriate to compare the simulations themselves with computer games that also recreate interactive pictures of ancient civilizations.
However, according to a new study, the creation of such a complex simulation is seen by scientists as impossible even in theory. The reason is simple: in the part of the universe known to us, there are simply no elements capable of forming mechanisms with such high computing power to model something so colossal.
Reality or Simulation: Physics vs. Fiction
The Oxford team asked the question: is it possible to build a computer simulation powerful and complex enough to show the quantum effects of many physical bodies? For those who are poorly versed in quantum physics, we explain that in our Universe the number of interactions of quantums with each other is so large that it simply defies description. Specifically, the scientists tested an anomaly known as the quantum Hall effect using the Monte Carlo method, a computational technique that uses random sampling to study complex quantum systems.
The researchers found that in order to accurately model the quantum phenomena that occur in matter, the system must be extremely complex. This complexity increased exponentially as the number of particles needed to model the full picture increased. As a result, it became clear that this impossible purely physically - and this despite the fact that physicists included in their calculations only a part of the world known to mankind, and not the entire Universe as a whole. Scientists emphasized that in order to store complete information even about a couple of hundred electrons, a computer memory with more than is available in the world is needed. “However, the possibility cannot be ruled out that some physical property (meaning the characteristic of a hypothetical simulation) specifically creates an obstacle to efficient classical simulation of many-particle quantum systems,” they write.
The physical limitation demonstrated by the researchers is enough to nullify all hypotheses about the superintelligence, forcing people to live in a huge computer simulation. Contrary to the claims of Musk or Tyson, the achievements of mankind, apparently, are still the merit of the people themselves and their painstaking work, and not a pre-written program that leads the development of mankind along a course set from above.
However, it cannot be argued that a person has known the Universe so well to make such statements with 100% certainty. The assumption of probabilities, even fantastic ones, is one of the qualities due to which people make more and more breakthroughs in science, pushing the border of the “impossible” further and further over and over again.
Physicists from Israel and Russia have demonstrated that humanity does not live in a matrix.
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The specialists tried to model a quantum system (a two-dimensional gas with a fractional quantum Hall effect) by classical methods (ultimately based on the operating action of classical mechanics, the Feynman integral).
As the number of particles in the simulation increased, the scientists found that the computational resources required to run the simulation did not grow linearly, but exponentially. In this case, storing information about a few hundred electrons would require a memory built from more atoms than is contained in the observable universe.
"It also shows that Hall conduction is indeed a quantum effect for which there is no local classical counterpart," said co-author Zohar Ringel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel).
The first part of the cult trilogy "The Matrix" was released in 1999. The film won four Oscars, as well as 28 different awards and 36 nominations. The film depicts a future in which the reality that exists for most people is actually a brain-in-a-flask simulation created by intelligent machines to subdue and pacify the human population, while the heat and electrical activity of their bodies are used by the machines as a source energy.
The possibility of time travel by optical methods has been refuted by scientists from Hong Kong. However, there still remains the hypothetical possibility of creating a time machine using supergravity regions, like those of black holes or "wormholes".
One hypothetical way to travel through time is to travel at or above the speed of light. Despite one of the fundamental statements of Einstein's theory of relativity, which is the impossibility of achieving speeds greater than the speed of light, over the past ten years a discussion has unfolded in the scientific community, the essence of which is that single photons can be "superluminal".
Proving the existence of such photons would mean the theoretical possibility of time travel, since these photons would violate the principle of causality.
This principle in classical physics means the following: any event that occurred at time t 1 can affect the event that occurred at time t 2 only if t 1 is less than t 2 . In the theory of relativity, this principle is formulated in a similar way, only the conditions associated with relativistic effects are added to it, due to which time depends on the chosen frame of reference.
The reason for resuming the discussion about the existence of "superluminal" photons appeared in January 2010. Then an article by American scientists was published in the Optic Express magazine, which was described by the science department of Gazeta.Ru. In their experiment, the researchers passed photons through a stack of materials of various nature.
By alternating layers of high and low refractive indices, the scientists observed that individual photons traveled through a 2.5 micron thick plate at what seemed to be superluminal speeds.
The authors of the work tried to explain this phenomenon from the standpoint of the corpuscular-wave nature of light (after all, light is both a wave and a stream of particle-photons at the same time) without violating the theory of relativity, arguing that the observed speed is some kind of illusion. In the experiment, light both starts and ends its journey as a photon. When one of these photons crosses the boundary between layers of material, it creates a wave on each surface - an optical precursor-precursor (for clarity, you can compare the optical precursor with an air wave that occurs in front of a moving train).
These waves interact with each other, creating an interference pattern: that is, the wave intensities are redistributed, creating a pattern of clear maxima and minima, just as a tidal layer is formed in the ocean with oncoming waves - water uplift. With a certain arrangement of the H- and L-layers, the interference of waves causes the effect of "early arrival" of a part of the photons. But other photons, on the contrary, arrive noticeably later than usual due to the appearance of interference minima in the picture. To correctly detect the speed, you need to register all the photons passing through the layers, then averaging will give the usual speed of light.
To confirm this explanation, it was necessary to make observations of a single photon and its optical precursor.
The corresponding experiment was set up by a group of scientists headed by Professor Du Chengwang of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
In their experiment, the researchers created a pair of photons, after which one of them was sent to a medium consisting of rubidium atoms cooled to low temperatures. By creating an electromagnetically induced transparency effect (where a medium that absorbs radiation becomes transparent when an appropriate field is applied to it), Du and colleagues successfully measured the velocities of both the photon itself and its optical precursor. “Our results show that the principle of causality is satisfied for individual photons,” says the abstract of an article published in Physical Review Letters.
Thus, this work put an end to the scientific discussion about whether there can be separate "superluminal" photons.
In addition, the experiment of Hong Kong scientists is important for the development of quantum optics, a better understanding of the mechanism of quantum transitions and, in general, some principles of physics.
Well, people who dream of traveling back in time should not despair.
Violation of the principle of causality by individual photons was not the only hypothetical possibility for creating a time machine.
