Sending messages into the past
By Brian Clegg
I’ve written a lot in the past about time travel, most notably in How To Build a Time Machine (aka Build Your Own Time Machine). As this says, time travel into the future is easy, while into the past is theoretically possible if practically unachievable. So I was intrigued to see a New Scientist headline reading We have figured out a new way to send messages into the past.
To be honest, I should have known better, as the reason I stopped subscribing to New Scientist is that I got fed up of the magazine’s hyperbolic clickbait headlines. It’s not that the story is uninteresting, but rather that the headline is not the usual speculatively meaningless ‘might’, ‘may be’, ‘could’ or ‘seems’. No, this example is worse: the headline is a downright lie. We have definitely not figured out a new way to send messages into the past.
The starting point of the science is quantum entanglement, something else I’ve written about in The God Effect. Here, linked quantum particles can remain part of the same quantum system when physically separated, in effect providing an instant link between them (though it can’t be used to communicate information). Some physicists suggest this effect involves a linkage operating backwards in time, and that an imagined experiment using this effect in a noisy channel could lead to better communication strategies for noisy devices. So, a quite interesting possibility (note that ‘could’, though).
However, nobody is suggesting that we have a way to send messages into the past. In the article, we get ‘sending messages backwards in time isn’t a practical issue,’ and a quote from physicist Andreas Winter saying ‘As far as we know, time travel or signalling back in time is not possible in our world. We don’t know of any mechanism that would make it possible.’
Would it really be so bad if science article headlines were honest?
Image from Unsplash+ by Allison Saeng
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/05/sending-messages-into-past.html
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