They Reversed Time in a Quantum Experiment — It Didn’t Go as Expected

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In a sealed tube of chloroform inside a twelve-tesla magnet in Rio, heat ran the wrong way. For two thousandths of a second the cold nucleus got colder and the warm one got warmer, with nothing pumping it. Then the lines crossed back, and the reason they crossed back is the part nobody expected.

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This video follows the Rio experiment pass by pass: a hydrogen and a carbon nucleus in the same molecule, the pulse that locks them together, the twenty-two readouts across a window barely two milliseconds wide, the control run with the locking pulse left out, and the moment at 2.1 milliseconds when the flow turns around. Then the price: the reversal was paid for with the correlation the two nuclei shared, and when that ran out the arrow of time snapped forward again. From there, the same question on a quantum processor (two qubits came home 85 percent of the time, a third qubit halved it), the one electron in the age of the universe that undoes itself by chance, the photon in Vienna and Hefei sent through a crystal forwards and backwards at once, and the chip Los Alamos wants to build that undoes its own measurements.

The people who built the photon circuit say it themselves: it is not an inversion of the arrow of time. The Los Alamos design is a proposal, not a result. Everything else in this video is a published measurement.

SOURCES
Micadei et al., "Reversing the direction of heat flow using quantum correlations," Nature Communications 10, 2456 (2019)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10333-7
Lesovik et al., "Arrow of time and its reversal on the IBM quantum computer," Scientific Reports 9, 4396 (2019)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40765-6
Argonne National Laboratory / MIPT press release, March 2019
https://www.anl.gov/article/physicists-reverse-time-using-quantum-computer
Strömberg et al., "Experimental superposition of a quantum evolution with its time reverse," Physical Review Research 6, 023071 (2024); arXiv:2211.01283
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.01283
Quanta Magazine, "How Quantum Physicists 'Flipped Time' (and How They Didn't)," 27 January 2023
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-quantum-physicists-flipped-time-and-how-they-didnt-20230127/
Garcia-Pintos et al. (Los Alamos), "Reshaping the Quantum Arrow of Time," Physical Review X 16 (2026); LANL press release 19 March 2026
https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0319-reshaping-quantum-arrow

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