Simulations of ’backwards time travel’ can improve scientific experiments

Physicists have shown that simulating models of hypothetical time travel can solve experimental problems that appear impossible to solve using standard physics. We are not proposing a time travel machine, but rather a deep dive into the fundamentals of quantum mechanics David Arvidsson-Shukur If gamblers, investors and quantum experimentalists could bend the arrow of time, their advantage would be significantly higher, leading to significantly better outcomes. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have shown that by manipulating entanglement - a feature of quantum theory that causes particles to be intrinsically linked - they can simulate what could happen if one could travel backwards in time. So that gamblers, investors and quantum experimentalists could, in some cases, retroactively change their past actions and improve their outcomes in the present. Whether particles can travel backwards in time is a controversial topic among physicists, even though scientists have previously simulated models of how such spacetime loops could behave if they did exist. By connecting their new theory to quantum metrology, which uses quantum theory to make highly sensitive measurements, the Cambridge team has shown that entanglement can solve problems that otherwise seem impossible. The study appears in the journal  Physical Review Letters .