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Physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia claim to have discovered time teleportation, no flux capacitors involved: Just like quantum physics allows for teleportation in space, they say that the same is possible in time. Time travel to... the future!

Now, hold on to your plutonium-proof underpants. This doesn't mean we are going to the 24-and-a-half century driving Mr. Fusion-powered DeLoreans. Their discovery shows that entangled quantum particles can travel into the future without actually being present during the time between now and the future.

Before, we knew that quantum teleportation works in space. Two identical particles at different locations are linked in such a way that, when you change the state of one, the other one instantly changes in exactly the same way, no matter how many miles or light-years are between them. This is a phenomenon that defies our understanding of reality, and it just got even more complex with this discovery.

University of Queensland's scientists Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph claim that the quantum entanglement is a fundamental part of the universe, and it works both in space and time, so changing the state of particle today instantly changes the same particle in the future, even while the particle will not exist between those two points. This is how it works

(...) imagine an experiment that Ralph and Olson describe in which a qubit is sent into the future. The idea is that a detector acts on a qubit and then generates a classical message describing how this particle can be detected. Then, at some point in the future, another detector at the same position in space, receives this message and carries out the required measurement, thereby reconstructing the qubit.

But there's a twist. Olson and Ralph show that the detection of the qubit in the future must be symmetric in time with its creation in the past. "If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisely a quarter past 12:00 in order to achieve entanglement," they say. For that reason, they call this process "teleportation in time".

How is this possible? If I knew, I wouldn't be writing this article with a big headache. [Cornell University Library via MIT Technology Review]