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n2doc

(47,953 posts)
Sun Jan 12, 2014, 11:50 AM Jan 2014

Researchers show possibility of cloning quantum information from the past

Popular television shows such as “Doctor Who” have brought the idea of time travel into the vernacular of popular culture. But problem of time travel is even more complicated than one might think. LSU’s Mark Wilde has shown that it would theoretically be possible for time travelers to copy quantum data from the past.

It all started when David Deutsch, a pioneer of quantum computing and a physicist at Oxford, came up with a simplified model of time travel to deal with the paradoxes that would occur if one could travel back in time. For example, would it be possible to travel back in time to kill one’s grandfather? In the Grandfather paradox, a time traveler faces the problem that if he kills his grandfather back in time, then he himself is never born, and consequently is unable to travel through time to kill his grandfather, and so on. Some theorists have used this paradox to argue that it is actually impossible to change the past.

“The question is, how would you have existed in the first place to go back in time and kill your grandfather?” said Mark Wilde, an LSU assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and with the Center for Computation and Technology, or CCT.

Deutsch solved the Grandfather paradox originally using a slight change to quantum theory, proposing that you could change the past as long as you did so in a self-consistent manner.

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http://www.followfacts.com/time-warp-researchers-show-possibility-of-cloning-quantum-information-from-the-past/

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