Scientists accidentally measure 'negative time', where clocks move backwards
Time has always mystified scientists, but quantum physicists have just made things even more complex after they measured 'negative time' in a new experiment. Imagine looking at a clock and watching the hands literally tick backward, well that is the reality researchers just uncovered in a groundbreaking study published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Some people have speculated that time travel already exists with evidence seemingly found within paintings and hidden details captured by photographs, and the implications of such a concept would be significant.
While we might not have actual 'time travel' yet, the science did just make a massive leap. The research team including theoretical physicist Professor Howard Wiseman has successfully measured "negative time" in a laboratory experiment, proving that under specific quantum conditions, light particles can actually exit a space before they have even finished entering it.
How physicists successfully measured 'negative time' in the lab
Theoretical quantum physicist Howard Wiseman, Professor of Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics at Griffith University, has outlined the discovery he made with a team of researchers in SciTechDaily, following the publishing of a study in Physical Review Letters.
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It revolves around the concept of atomic excitation when a photon traverses a cloud of atoms, as while its exact time spent moving through the atom seemingly cannot be measured, an average can instead be produced.
"To address this question, we used the cross-Kerr effect to weakly probe the degree of atomic excitation caused by a transmitted resonant 'signal' photon by measuring the phase shift induced on a (separate, off-resonant) 'probe' beam, postselected on cases when the signal photon is transmitted," the study outlines.
What they discovered is that the time actually occurs earlier than expected, with Wiseman indicating that "it arrives so early it appears to have spent a negative amount of time inside the cloud — to exit, on average, before it enters."
To explain what 'negative time' actually looks like, physicist Josiah Sinclair used a helpful analogy when speaking to Scientific American: “A negative time delay may seem paradoxical, but what it means is that if you built a ‘quantum’ clock to measure how much time atoms are spending in the excited state, the clock hand would, under certain circumstances, move backward rather than forward.”
Does this prove a real-life time machine is finally possible?
This isn't an entirely new concept as scientists have been aware of 'negative time' since the early 1990s, but only now is it starting to be taken seriously as a measure that could perhaps even lead to the discovery of time travel.
Wiseman was quick to shut this down, however, indicating that the experiment as a whole can be explained by 'standard physics' instead of the discovery of a time machine, but he does instead propose that negative dwell time isn't the 'artifact' it was once believed to be.
"However paradoxical it may seem, it has a directly measurable effect on the atomic cloud that the photon traverses. And it reminds us that there are still lands to discover on the odyssey that is quantum research," Wiseman concluded.