SCIENTISTS have built the world’s first time machine — sort of.

Working with electrons in the bizarre realm of quantum mechanics, they first created the equivalent of a break for a game of pool.

2 The sub-atomic 'time machine' has a long way to go before you can climb into it like Dr. Who's Tardis Credit: Alamy

The “balls” scattered and, according to the laws of physics, should have appeared to split in a haphazard way.

But researchers managed to make them reform in their original order — looking as if they were turning back time.

Lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik, of Moscow’s Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, said: “We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.”

His team used a rudimentary quantum computer, which carries information on subatomic particles. He hopes their findings, in journal Scientific Reports, will help improve processing power.

2 Scientists were able to program a quantum computer to 'reverse' through time – like balls returning to their starting position in a game of pool

Not quite Dr Who, but even Time Lords had to start somewhere . . .

So how does it work? Well the time machine is actually a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electron qubits.

A qubit is a the basic unit of quantum information – a unit that represents one, zero, and both one and zero at the same time.

Researchers ran an "evolution program", which caused the qubits to enter a complicated changing pattern of ones and zeroes.

And during this process, the order was lost – like hitting balls at the start of a game of pool.

A separate program then modified the state of this quantum computer so that it evolved backwards, returning from chaos to order.

This allowed the qubits to return to their original starting point.

Scientists were able to perform this so-called "time reversal" successfully 85 per cent of the time with two qubits, and had a 50 per cent success rate with three qubits.

What is quantum computing? Quantum computing could use interactive photons, but what actually is it? Computer chips are getting smaller and faster, but there's a limit to how small we can go

Quantum computing is a way to keep making computers faster once we hit the limit of normal computer chips

It's based on the idea of using tiny particles that can exist in multiple random "states" at any one time

Quantum bits (or qubits) in a quantum computer could be a one, a zero, or both at the same time

Think of a giant pole running through the centre of the earth

The pole would be in the middle, but also at both ends of the planet, simultaneously

In this example, a qubit could be at any point of the planet, and at all points of the planet, at any given time

That means a qubit could store huge amounts of information, because it has millions of possible "states"

This means that a quantum computer would be able to perform complex tasks very quickly by utilising qubits

Sadly, quantum computers are still very much a work-in-progress

But scientists hope that by using tiny particles like photons, it would be possible to advance quantum computing research

The idea was to test out a theory about whether time can reverse itself – at least for a single particle for a fraction of a second.

When scientists observe an electron, they can't figure out its exact position, but can determine where it's roughly located.

But over time, it becomes more difficult to tell where that electron is, because the region of space containing it "spreads out". Or rather, it becomes more "chaotic".

This increases the uncertainty of the electron's position – a core principle of Schrodinger's equation.

The team were able to then calculate the probability of a "smeared out" electron spontaneously "localising" back to its recent past – travelling through time, in effect.

And it turns out that if you observe 10billion freshly localised electrons every second for 13.7billion years, you'd only see this happen once.

And even then, the electron would only travel no more than a ten-billionth of a second into the past.

That's not ideal, because not being able to predict time-reversal makes the system useless to scientists.

That's why it's so important that scientists were able to successfully "reverse time on demand" with a quantum computer.

Doc Brown shows Marty the flux capacitor in the time travelling DeLorean time machine in Back to the Future II

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