Is a time machine coming soon? Breaking News Breaking news from academia. You can find the news everywhere — , also and . Journalists seem to be convinced that we humans are now able to construct a using . They are all quoting the and we can it and go back to the 20th century and possibly stop the World War. Physicists reverse time using quantum computer here there ‘time machine’ ‘cutting-edge’ ‘quantum technology’ ‘arrow of time’ ‘flip’ It is claimed that the , might not be true. Okay. As a half-scientist, I decided to read the directly. I don’t understand most of the details but I think I have a better understanding than most journalists do. second law of thermodynamics can be violated irreversibility of entropy paper Photo by on Bank Phrom Unsplash So… What is Happening? Are we able to reverse time? . Are we one step closer to a time machine? *.Did they violate any physics that we think we know of? . Kind of Not really Nah Scientists are now able to ‘simulate’ the previous state correctly given the current state 85% of the time in a two-qubit quantum computer, and only 50% in a three-qubit setting. Let’s be clear, We all could play a video backward and we would have ‘reversed time’, without violating any physics of course. In general, you could theoretically simulate any reversible process backward in time. that is by no means a violation of the second law of thermodynamics or any physics. This is not about time travel. Photo by on Devin Avery Unsplash Don’t Get Me Wrong… I am not suggesting that what the researchers did was useless, wrong, or whatever. Reverse computation is difficult. For example, can we possibly simulate climate backward in time? , with a certain confidence interval. Does that mean we can go back to the past? . Are we violating any physics? , it is a simulation. Quite possibly Not really Definitely not Photo by on Icons8 team Unsplash The Takeaway There is only one truth, but there are infinite interpretations of the truth. Most of the headlines and buzzwords probably don’t do justice to the findings, and it is extremely dangerous to infer anything beyond our comprehension. Scientists barely understand quantum physics, and no one should expect anyone to understand it. This is a demonstration of academic integrity. Academia is therefore responsible for producing more logical interpretations on their own findings, and should not delegate it to the general public or over-interpret for media covfefe. It is not the media’s job to tell the truth. They are a business, just like any other business, and their job is to make money. — Jay Foreman Photo by on Sidharth Bhatia Unsplash About Me Thank you for reading! If you are interested in the application of data science, check out my latest articles: _The journey on the unsinkable — what AI can learn from the disaster_hackernoon.com Would You Survive the Titanic? _Exploring data visualization tools in Python_towardsdatascience.com Visualizing bike mobility in London using interactive maps and animations *Are we one step closer to a time machine? Assuming it does exist in the future, we are technically getting closer to that time. Time moves forward. Originally published at edenau.github.io .
