The work, reported in the August 22 issue of Nature Communications, is among the first to reveal the quantum properties of time.
The flow of time doesn’t observe a straight arrow forward, but one where cause and effect can co-exist both in the forward and backward direction.
The team at Steven Institute of Technology conducted a Gedanken experiment. They started by asking the question, “what would a clock measure if it was influenced by a massive object in a quantum superposition state, i.e. both near and far at the same time?“
In presence of a sufficiently massive object, the sequence of events exists in a state of superposition. (Steven Institute of Technology)