You are at a party and It could have been nothing out of the ordinary. Good wine, great company and some very tasty titbits. You are at a party and it could have been nothing out of the ordinary if only the invitation had not arrived after the party. But here you are the life at a party. The life at a Stephen Hawking’s party – or so the experiment of the late physicists would have concluded if time travel existed.
Almost a decade after this party – that is yet to be attended by any time traveller and the ongoing conclusion that time travel is not yet possible – comes the news that scientists are about to the shift the sands of time towards attending this party. Using quantum computers, the scientists are on the cusp of defying the second law of thermodynamics, proving future to past travelling is a click away.
The Second Law of thermodynamics dictates the state of energy once transformed or in use will always lead to degeneration or a disorderly state. This law was what researchers were able to disagree with creating a state that evolves in a “backward” direction, moving from chaos to order by using quantum computers.
According to the research published by scientists from the Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT) Moscow and their counterparts in the US and Switzerland, tiny particles were successfully restored back to their previous state like billiard balls on a table. Imagine a triangle of disorganised snooker balls being able to reorder themselves into their original formation after being broken.
The researchers explained the experiment as moving in the opposite direction of ‘time’s arrow’. This was made possible by using negatively charged electrons mimicking billiard balls being broken by a shot. The physics behind these balls involves collisions and without any intelligent influence, the end result of this collision is chaos. However, using a basic quantum computer, the researchers were able to reform these balls back into their exact, original state before the “shot”, effectively going back a fraction of second into the past.
We just might make it back to Stephen Hawking’s party after all.
For the experiment, the researchers stimulated the balls using subatomic particles, whilst the ‘time machine’ is created from a basic quantum computer which is made up of electron ‘qubits’. These qubits can work as zero, one, or even as both simultaneously. During the course of the experiment, they were able to make qubits recognise and “talk” to each other using a proprietary algorithm. The new algorithm will boost scientists research all over the world as they bend the law of nature at subatomic level.
But what does this have to do with the blockchain?
The blockchain is ushering a new era of value exchange. An era without borders, without restrictions, without mediators, without trust issues. The foundation of the blockchain is based on cryptographic protection and proof using computational devices. This protection remains one of the most expensive and most difficult algorithmic layer to crack. Using current computing resources, cracking just a single one of these private keys using brute force would take 1.09 x 1019 years at a trillion keys a second.
However, imagine a computer powerful enough to unravel the very fabric of time itself. Calculating the correct hash for any private key would be a matter of seconds – if not fractions of a second. Taking down an entire blockchain may take a minute or two, and bringing down the internet is just a few short hours away.
This nightmare scenario is what Quantum1Net has set out to address before it happens. You think this is the stuff of science fiction? They said the same thing about the internet too.