Scientists Prove Time Travel Is Real
Even without the added benefit of an iconic 80s car and a very specific speed requirement, a team of scientists have discovered that a form of time travel is real… well sort of. While humans are nowhere close to creating a way to send one another back and forth through time just yet, a team of researchers, led by Daniela Angulo of the University of Toronto, have observed a phenomenon known as “negative time.” The team discovered that photons, also known as light particles, were capable of a form of atomic excitation, or the act of passing through a medium and getting absorbed, after being seen exiting the medium before entering.
A Scientific Breakthrough
In a September 5 post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Aephraim Steinberg, a physicist at the University of Toronto and member of the research team, excitedly wrote about the team’s findings being published. “It took a positive amount of time, but our experiment observing that photons can make atoms seem to spend a negative amount of time in the excited state is up!” Steinberg wrote. The idea for the experiment began in 2017, when Steinberg and then-doctoral student Josiah Sinclair wished to research the interaction of light and matter, specifically atomic excitation.
Searching For A Reason For The Time Delay
Over the course of the next three years, Steinberg and Sinclair attempted to adjust the scope of their eventual experiment, looking to find an explanation as to why there appears to be a time delay in the appearance of light as the light particles move through the medium during atomic excitation. Despite previous researchers hypothesizing as to why this phenomenon occurs, Sinclair says that there was never an “expert consensus on what the right answer would be.”
While many quantum physicists attempted to explain the phenomenon, time travel was certainly extremely low on the list of plausible explanations.
Blasting Photons
Following years of preparations, the team of researchers began their experiment by blasting photons through a cloud of extremely cold rubidium atoms before measuring the level of atomic excitation of the photons. The results mystified the team, leading to what could very well be evidence of the existence of time travel. At the time, members of the research team were so surprised by their findings, they had to make sure that they didn’t make a mistake at some point in their experiment.
We Won’t Be Traveling Through Time Yet
At times, when the photons passed through the cloud of gas without being absorbed, the research team discovered that the atoms were still excited for the same amount of time if they had been absorbed. In other instances, the research team observed that when the photons were able to be absorbed, the light particles would actually be re-emitted without any delay whatsoever, doing so in an instant in some cases.
While the results can point to evidence of time travel for some, the team of researchers insist that their findings don’t completely alter our previous understanding of time, it just places “more physical significance” on negative time that originally thought.
Moving The Clock Back
“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,” Sinclair explains. Okay, a clock hand moving backwards does sound an awful lot like time travel, but it’s hard to argue against a literal atomic physicist.
For now, the team’s research into atomic excitation has yet to be peer reviewed, meaning that anyone’s excitement over the possible time travel revelation should be held in check and expectations to travel to any point in time should be reeled in.
Source: Cornell University
