(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists set up an incredibly subtle experiment in which they momentarily destroyed the space-time familiar to us.
The scientific world is amazed at the sophistication of experimenters and talks about how the discovery will allow you to create incredibly powerful computers that predict in advance what you are going to calculate.
And we will try to tell in simple words what, in fact, fuss is about.
Dream about time machine
Einstein convinced us, and we repeat like parrots: we all live in four-dimensional space. Length, width, height, and… time. Here is just a snag.
We can move in length and width (I’ll move my chair right now and move), it’s a little more difficult to travel in height (although almost everyone can jump), but with time it doesn’t work.
Length-width-height is as if “frozen” in the flow of time, and time carries us.
Even Plato said that there is no time, that this is an illusion, and the gods look at things as a whole, seeing both the beginning and the end of everything in the world. But man is a slave of time, he is not given.
At the same time, right here and now, time is blatantly ignored, for example, photons. The light that hits your eyes is made up of photons. They move – right, at the speed of light, and if so, time has stopped for them.
After all, time flows the slower the faster you move, and at the speed of light it stops altogether.
From the point of view of a photon, it is eternal, from your point of view, it was born a microsecond ago in a light bulb and has already disappeared, absorbed in your eye. Some nonsense.
Serious physicists will add insanity: many elementary particles quietly travel in time, that is, first they die, then they are born. Moreover, without such a perdimonocle, modern physics would be impossible, it stands on this.
And these elementary particles exist not somewhere on a laboratory table, but right here, in your clothes, in the air, in your body, everywhere.
Nevertheless, we are assured that we will never go for a walk, that it is forbidden, sit down for yourself and enjoy what you have now. But is it?
The most powerful experiment in history
In 1803, Thomas Young staged what is rightfully called the most powerful experiment in the history of physics. Spaceships, smartphones and nuclear reactors are all nipped in the bud in this experience.
But Jung himself, of course, did not plan anything like that. He took two thin slits and let the sunlight pass through them.
On the screen, instead of images of two slits, he saw a complex pattern of dark and light stripes. He realized that light is a wave. The stripes are the crests and troughs of the wave.
The real fun, however, began in the 20th century, when physicists managed to pass through two slits not just a stream of light, but a single photon.
It would seem that the photon will pass either through one slit or through another, it is one. It wasn’t there! A photon, seeing that there were two slits in front of it, immediately turned into a wave and interacted with itself.
That is, he “understood” what the experimenters were preparing for him. It’s so logical: like Plato’s god, who looks at the world outside of time, the photon, of course, “knows” in advance that there will be an experiment.
That he will be offered two slots. And that he had to manage to get through both. But this means that the photon… thinks?
This is how modern quantum mechanics was born, a strange science, without which, however, we would not have the Internet or smartphones.
We do not understand the essence of quantum mechanics, but we use its fruits with might and main.
Draw the beast from the cave
But what if you take and outwit a photon? Introduce a new factor, time, into Young’s experiment and force the “eternal” photon to play according to the rules of our world?
This is exactly what physicists at Imperial College London have done.
So, here are two slits, the photon is getting ready to go through them. But as soon as he flew out, first one gap disappears, then the second. Needless to say, how difficult this is to do.
There are not even microseconds, there are no words for such periods of time. But they were able to. AND?
The photon darted around. He first sees two gaps, creates a plan of action for himself, and then bam – he was left alone.
The photon does not fade here either, it changes the plan in the course of the play. But one more trouble, bam – and not a single gap! What happened?
Everything turned out exactly as quantum mechanics says. The photon tried to pass through the cracks, as if they had not been removed. He saw the cracks and got ready, but did not have time to reorganize.
That is, he squeezed through cracks that no longer existed. It’s the same as: there was a hole in the fence, and everyone climbed into it, trampled down the path.
The hole was patched up, but people are still stomping along the path to the non-existent hole.
The only surprise: the photon turned out to be slow-witted. He reacted to innovations more slowly than theory predicted.
Thus, we “lured the beast (photon) out of the cave of eternity”, where there is no time, and made it understand that time is here, it exists.
And this is a complete equivalent of the situation, as if we, living in the flow of time, would take it and stop it. Or reverse the flow of time. That is, physicists have built a time machine for the photon!
So,what is next?
For the first time, scientists have destroyed a single fabric of space-time, this is a fact.
Amazingly, they did this with the help of an experiment, the idea of which appeared back in 1803. Of course, the technology cannot be compared, but the idea is the same.
And now what to do with this destroyed tissue? There are quick repercussions. The method of removing gaps at lightning speed will be used in quantum computers.
The speed of such machines is already incredible, but here some kind of space opens up. We may finally be able to accurately predict the weather.
While computers can’t handle this task, there’s a lot of data, machines are slow.
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