(EurekaAlert) Russian scientists from the Moscow Institute of Science & Technology have apparently reversed the flow of time in an experiment they conducted on a quantum computer. The team of physicists managed to restore IBM’s public quantum computer to the state it had been in just a moment earlier–a nuanced result, but one that could have striking implications for our understanding of time itself.
“We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time,” said Gordey Lesovik, a quantum physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology who led the research project.
“This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time: from the past to the future,” commented the study’s lead author Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information Technology at MIPT.
The entire study is described in greater detail in the lengthy press release quoted here from the Moscow Institute of Physics & technology.