Posted on 05/06/2026 8:32:36 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Researchers have proposed a theoretical approach that could allow messages to be sent into the past using principles from quantum mechanics. Indeed, it could be happening right now already!
The concept does not enable physical travel through time but focuses on information transfer through causal loops at the quantum scale.
The work, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, builds on ideas from general relativity and quantum entanglement.
A technique inspired by the film Interstellar suggests a new way of communicating backwards in time, but it could help improve conventional communication systems as well https://t.co/FXQTvhE6uE — New Scientist (@newscientist) May 2, 2026
It draws a parallel to the causal loop depicted in Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar, where a message is sent to the past via a watch.
Co-author Dr Kaiyuan Ji, a researcher at Cornell University, told New Scientist: “The father remembers how the daughter decodes his future message. So he can instruct himself on what is the best way to encode the message.”
Professor Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) described an earlier related experiment from 2010: “It was the equivalent of sending a photon a few nanoseconds backwards in time, and having it try to kill its former self.”
Lloyd noted the practical challenges: “Nobody’s built an actual physical, closed time-like curve, and there are reasons to think it’s very hard to make one. But all channels are noisy.”
The paper explains how prior knowledge of how a message was decoded could improve encoding in the future: “The father, who is in the future, may retrieve his memory of past events he has witnessed, even including the daughter’s decoding of the message which he is about to send! It would thus not be surprising that he will consult his memory of the daughter’s decoding when encoding his message, so as to maximize the efficiency of the communication.”
According to the research, this approach could make backward time messages clearer than those sent forward in normal time, even over noisy channels.
The team suggests the idea could be tested experimentally at the quantum level and may offer insights into communication through noisy systems.
The concept relies on closed time-like curves (CTCs), paths allowed by general relativity where something could theoretically return to its own past.
On macroscopic scales, creating such curves would require immense energy, but quantum systems may permit analogous effects through entanglement.
Quantum entanglement links particles so that the state of one instantly influences the other, regardless of distance.
The research explores whether this “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein called it, could be interpreted as information moving backward in time.
While the proposal remains theoretical, it highlights that nothing in current physics strictly forbids certain forms of time communication at the quantum scale.
Future experiments could help clarify how information behaves in such systems and potentially improve real-world technologies.
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But if we could send messages back in time then we would suddenly remember when we got the message from back in time. We would remember getting the message before it was sent.
I’ve often wondered about these famous ghosts seen and the idea of time travel, though being deceased seems to be part of that one. But what is that?
If this is indeed possible, I have an important request. Please tell the scientists to send a message to my 16-year-old self. Tell me to go ahead and ask Karen M. out.
I never did, and have regretted it ever since.
😕
Would banging your Ex last Friday be considered going back in time?
Asking for friend.
Only if you stole a couple of twenties from her wallet.
Exactly.
😁
Note to self:
Buy some Apple Stock in 1998
Bet Under on Rams-Patriots Super Bowl in LIII
Purchase a Bitcoin when it comes out.
Message to the past: Do not elect Obama!!!
Not if we have dementia
If I'm reading your question right, this is what is referred to as a haunting. When some ghostly figure from the past (famous or not) is repeatedly seen by a number of people in the same place and engaging in the same actions before vanishing (like seen coming down the stairs or sitting on a porch in a rocking chair, etc, to note some famous hauntings). Folks that study these things say these might be kind of episodes frozen in time tied to some traumatic or highly emotional event that leaves sort of an imprint on that places causing it to be observed again and again.
They keep saying it is impossible to travel into the past but I do it frequently. As a matter of fact I was just there last week!
Who will “read” the message? Pure theoretical bull. Based on the Pythagorean idea that math is “reality”, and that “physical” objects and processes had numbers associated with them. We’ve gotten very far with the ability to describe phenomena with our math, but the belief is the same. So now, any complex manipulation of numbers is presented as a bold fact....
IMHO
Some may have asked her out and regretted ever since it also.
I know. I have heard of that, but for eg the sighting of say, Anne Boleyn seen at the Tower of London that is not locked in time because it happened in the fifteen hundreds and has been seen by someone for eg in the twenty first century. If it were locked in time it would only be seen at the moment it happened. WE cannot see ‘back in time’ the moment it happened in the fifteen hundreds. What really does ‘locked in time’ mean?
Sending messages through time is the scenario of one of my all time favorite movies: “Frequency” - starring Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel
If it’s true, tell me yesterday.
I just want to go back to 1999 and bet that Arabs were going to crash two American planes into a New York skyscraper, that a black guy with an African name would be elected president within ten years and that he would be followed by Donald Trump.
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