Physicists say sending messages back in time may be possible

The scene from Interstellar is iconic: a father stranded in the future, tapping messages to his daughter, who lives decades in his past. Every physicist who ever watched it registered the same thought: that’s not how time works. Three researchers have now worked out exactly how it could.

Physicists say sending messages back in time may be possible. The scene from Interstellar is iconic: a father stranded in the future, tapping messages to his daughter, who lives decades in his past. Every physicist who ever watched it registered the same thought: that’s not how time works. Three researchers have now worked out exactly how it could. They solved for the amount of information a sender in the future could push back to a receiver in the past – not through a perfect channel, but a noisy one. An Interstellar problem The paper models its scenario on the film. A father stranded behind a black hole signals his young daughter, who lives in his past. The film treats it as poetry; the team treats it as math. Kaiyuan Ji, a quantum information researcher at Cornell University ( Cornell ), posed the question carefully with collaborators...