Watch a movie backwards and you’ll likely get confused – but a quantum computer wouldn’t. That’s the conclusion of researcher Mile Gu at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University and collaborators.
In research published in Physical Review X, the international team showed that a quantum computer is less in thrall to the arrow of time than a classical computer. In some cases, it is as if the quantum computer doesn’t need to distinguish between cause and effect at all.
The new work is inspired by an influential discovery (known as causal asymmetry) made almost ten years ago by complexity scientists James Crutchfield and John Mahoney at the University of California, Davis. They showed that many statistical data sequences will have a built-in arrow of time. An observer who sees the data played from beginning to end, like the frames of a movie, can model what comes next using only a modest amount of memory about what occurred before. An observer who tries to model the system in reverse has a much harder task – potentially needing to track orders of magnitude more information.
“If causal asymmetry is only found in classical models, it suggests our perception of cause and effect, and thus time, can emerge from enforcing a classical explanation on events in a fundamentally quantum world”, researchers say. (1)
Look at the cosmos through the lenses of the irrational.
And you will discover a thrilling new perspective.
You are seeing…
Because you used to be blind…
You are alive…
Because you were dead…
You do exist.
Only because you never did…
You are everything.
Just because there is nothing…
