Scientists from the University of Rostock in Germany and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom have published a scientific paper titled “topological spatiotemporal events in photonic quantum walks.” Where they have managed to create light from vacuum, this has been achieved by manipulating the properties of time and space for the first time, time is a dimension, but it is a slightly strange dimension, because unlike the others, the height, length and width, the spatial ones where we can come and go along them, time only has one meaning.
The clock always advances, it never goes back, at most it can be affected by gravity and advance more or less quickly, it can go slower or it can go faster, for example, on the surface of the Earth which is a planet with a respectable gravity within the solar system, time advances slower than for example on the surface of the Moon where gravity is lower, it is a difference that humans could not appreciate.
On the moon, time passes faster at a rate of almost one second every 50 years compared to time on Earth, but it is fast and annoying enough to be annoying for computer equipment, which is why space agencies, specifically NASA, unless they now change the Artemis program to return to the Moon, but if not, China also wants to create specific clocks for use on the Moon, because there may be problems, especially with computer equipment that requires great doses of precision.
The researchers who are in the news now have looked for a different way to study time, it is the most amazing part of this story, they were inspired by time crystals or space-time crystals, that is, objects with repetitive patterns in time and space and they have begun to investigate the dimension of time from the perspective of topology, it is something new, this work is published on April 4, 2025.
Topology is the branch of mathematics dedicated to the study of those properties of geometric bodies that remain unaltered by transformations, for example, they study the properties of a cube, not of one in particular but of cubes in general, any cube will continue to be a cube and will have cube properties as long as it is a cube, logically, it will fulfill some specific topological properties related to being a cube, until we transform it into something else, but a cube would be the easiest thing topologically speaking.
What they have tried is to calculate the topological properties of time in this way, what the researchers did was study time based on its topological properties as if it were a structure, well at the end of the day it is just another dimension although with a peculiar characteristic, from our experience it is a unidirectional dimension, it only moves towards the future, it only always goes towards the future as I said before it can go a little faster or a little slower depending on gravity, we still don't know any other method to make it faster slower but with gravity we know what happens.
The past are those things that we either remember because we have lived them or any other phenomenon that was the cause of the effect that we perceive in the present, a volcanic eruption a million years ago could have been the cause of the stones that we stepped on a path and the future is something that, although it cannot be perceived or seen by humans and possibly other animals, at least all those who plan hunting strategies or collecting routes, can intuit the future.
We sense that due to the experience and knowledge we have, the stones on the path we walk will one day end up transformed into dust by the effect of erosion, wind and also rain, that would be the possible future of the path we are following, but we do not have real evidence of the future, we only have real evidence of the present moment.
The discovery made by British and German scientists is that light can “stick” to a specific point in space-time, or in other words appear or determine, because you are determining a moment in which that light must appear you can make a specific point of light appear in space-time.
One of the researchers, Professor Alexander Szameit from the University of Rostock, said literally: "It is almost biblical, at first there is nothing, then there is light, and there really is light around a single and precisely defined point in space and time." This is a topological event in the fabric of space-time and this provides them with a robustness that is unique and different from any other type of light that we know.
This light is not altered or interrupted and depending on its source it cannot suffer interference either. The normal lights that we know can suffer all types of interference, but not this one.
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