An international team of scientists claim to have found a way to speed up, slow down, and even reverse the clock of a given system by taking advantage of the unusual properties of the quantum world, Spanish newspaper El País reports.
In a series of six papers, the team from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna detailed their findings. The familiar laws of physics don't map intuitively onto the subatomic world, which is made up of quantum particles called qubits that can technically exist in more than one state simultaneously, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.
Now, the researchers say they've figured out how to turn these quantum particles' clocks forward and backward.
"In a theater, [classical physics], a movie is projected from beginning to end, regardless of what the audience wants," Miguel Navascués, a researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information who worked on the research, told El País.
"But at home [the quantum world], we have a remote control to manipulate the movie," he added. "We can rewind to a previous scene or skip several scenes ahead."
"We have made science fiction come true!" the researcher exclaimed.
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