Consequences/applications of "negative time evidence" article in the news, like time-loop computers breaking most of current ciphers?

[Robert Zwilling]

Scientists rarely include consequence of actions in their discoveries. Discovery is about narrowing things down, consequence of actions goes in the opposite direction, opening up countless possibilities that haven't even happened.

The internet was designed to distribute information under the worst possible situations. The whole technology is based on publicly broadcasting information in numbered packets so you can receive it in any order over any amount of time and still get the exact message. In the old days you could actually watch missing packets get resent. The point is that the internet was not designed to hold anything back, which includes secrets. The encryption, storage, and transmission is all done by the same equipment which means anyone can use it to do what they want. The art of electronics has no real borders, which means it can go outside the box anytime anyone wants to, which makes it a lot easier to solve supposedly unsolvable problems. The rules aren't set in stone so shortcuts are plentiful and easy to build. It's interesting how people have gone full circle and are back to storing digitally stored secrets in steel safes.

 

[Swank]

Who are you gonna call ... before technology changes status from Science Fiction to reality?
Scientists are too careful for such discussions ... I could only think of futurologists, SF people (?)
I talk with scientists about the test ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.15399 ), but if CPT symmetry remains valid (lots of arguments), then e.g. time-loop computers breaking ciphers seem weeks away, and humanity is not prepared ... even worse if it is already secretly used ...

And I'm saying if you want to have a cogent conversation with lay people, you might lay off the jargon and formulas.

 

[Tremendinah Rectiferus X]

I am wondering what would this look like to a lay person. I am imagining a wave with crests and dips and a little red bouoy sending signals to the centre of the wave and the lighthouse on the shore as it bobs up and down except that it's so light it often gets dragged back under the surface and so it looks like it's gone back in time a phase from the pov of the light house.

 

[Jarek]

The easiest to think is through the least action principle - that spacetime is kind of 4D jello, minimizing tension.
With time-loop we would try to build a loop inside this 4D jello - tension optimizing physics should make them self-consistent ( Novikov self-consistency principle - Wikipedia ).

E.g. closing electronic NOT gate into a loop in space, they get cyclic changes between yes and no ... but closing it in spacetime through transmission back in time, you would get a time paradox - physics would have to solve by breaking its weakest link: making e.g. the gate or channel back in time has lied.

Wanting to send to yourself some information back in time, you already had this information back then, or somehow this transmission did not succeed.
If such technology is widely used, e.g. crime would be nearly impossible - there would be sent information back to prevent it, hence to make this time loop self-consistent, physics through action optimization should make this act of crime did not happen.

 

[Swank]

E.g. closing electronic NOT gate into a loop in space, they get cyclic changes between yes and no ... but closing it in spacetime through transmission back in time, you would get a time paradox - physics would have to solve by breaking its weakest link: making e.g. the gate or channel back in time has lied.

So there is something in physics that has to be violated by creating the impossible, like my FTL example of negative mass?

 

[Jarek]

Physics rather cannot be perfect, e.g. transistor always has some tiny error probability, there is always randomness e.g. in quantum fluctuations ...
Such hypothetical information channel back in time also just cannot be perfect - I imagine they will have some strength, determining how likely action optimization would lie to break time loop in the channel as the weakest link.

For two players with opposite goals, the one with stronger channel would get better hints to win - there could arms race e.g. USA vs China for building the strongest channels, which I imagine will be based on Free-electron laser - Wikipedia