Quantum physics has an unsettling hypothesis: every historical moment is still encoded in matter. The barrier isn’t physical. It’s computational.

By Not Nulled Labs — Hybrid Core editorial experiment

There is a scene in Back to the Future that modern physics never forgave. The DeLorean hits 88 miles per hour, the flux capacitor fires 1.21 gigawatts, and Doc Brown grins like he just outwitted the universe. It’s a beautiful image. And it is, physically, a disaster.

Displacing mass backward through the fabric of space-time requires either infinite energy or the creation of a gravitational singularity so extreme it would disintegrate the traveler, the car, and probably Hill Valley County before the speedometer registered anything at all. Heavy particle physics doesn’t negotiate with Hollywood.

But science fiction rarely gets the direction wrong. It gets the vehicle wrong.

What Zemeckis didn’t see — and what theoretical physicists have been staring at with growing fascination for decades — is that time doesn’t need to be traveled. It needs to be read. And reading the past isn’t a problem of infinite energy. It’s a problem of information, of entropy, and ultimately, of computation. A class of problem that artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics are only just beginning to touch.

This essay grows from that friction. It is not the product of an automated generator chewing through Wikipedia data, but an editorial experiment under our Hybrid Core model: the intuition and skepticism of a human team using the processing engines of an AI to audit real equations, verify published experiments, and push a hypothesis as far as physics will let it go. We don’t claim to replace the theoretical physicist. We claim the right to ask the questions others don’t bother to formulate.

The first one is the simplest and the strangest: does the past still exist?

The Burned Book and Shannon’s Secret

To understand whether the past can be recovered, you first have to understand why we believe it is lost. The culprit is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, formulated in the nineteenth century by Rudolf Clausius with an economy of words that hides its full brutality: in any isolated system, entropy — the degree of disorder among its particles — always increases. Always. Without macroscopic exceptions.

An egg falls and breaks. The ordered atoms of the shell scatter into a chaos of yolk and albumin. Nobody has ever watched that process reverse spontaneously, because the probability of it happening is so absurdly small that the observable universe isn’t old enough to witness it once.

Take an original manuscript from 1960 and burn it in a bonfire. Human eyes register total destruction. The paper becomes smoke, soot, and thermal radiation. The information disappears.

This is where Claude Shannon walks in, and where physics makes a turn that changes everything.

In 1948, Shannon published A Mathematical Theory of Communication, the paper that founded modern information theory. Among its deepest demonstrations was one that seemed impossible: the entropy of an information system and the entropy of classical thermodynamics are, mathematically, the same thing. Physical disorder and information loss are two descriptions of the same phenomenon.

The direct consequence is so radical it still makes many physicists uncomfortable: information is never truly destroyed. It only disperses.

If we could track the exact position, velocity, and spin of every smoke molecule, every gram of floating ash, and every infrared photon of heat released by that burned book, we could, in theory, apply the laws of physics in reverse and reconstruct the original text, word for word, letter for letter. The past hasn’t ceased to exist. It has become so complex and disorganized that we have no reader capable of deciphering the chaos. Human history is a fragmented hard drive where the data is still intact. The problem is the software.

The Experiment Nobody Expected (And What It Actually Proved)

What sounds like speculative hypothesis began showing cracks in reality in March 2019, when an international team of physicists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, ETH Zürich, and Argonne National Laboratory published in Scientific Reports an experiment that generated headlines worldwide, though few people understood exactly what had happened.

The team, led by Gordey Lesovik with Argonne physicist Valerii Vinokur as senior collaborator, used a public IBM quantum computer to do something classical thermodynamics considers impossible: reverse the state of a few quantum bits (qubits), returning them exactly to their previous state of order. The arrow of time, in a controlled microscopic system, ran backward.

“This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” Lesovik wrote in the study.

It’s important not to misread what this means. The experiment was not time travel. It was something more subtle and, in certain respects, more profound: they demonstrated that with the right algorithm, in a sufficiently controlled quantum environment, the thermodynamic direction of time is not a wall. It’s a statistical barrier.

To work at historical scale, an AI would need to operate under the principles of Von Neumann Entropy, the quantum equivalent of Clausius’s classical entropy, which measures the degree of disorder and entanglement in a quantum system through the formula:

Where ρ is the density matrix of the system: a complete mathematical description of the quantum state of all its particles. The trace (Tr) of that matrix multiplied by its natural logarithm gives a precise measure of how much information has been lost to entanglement with the environment. When S = 0, the system is perfectly pure and all its information is theoretically recoverable. The closer S gets to its maximum value, the more irrecoverable the system’s history becomes.

The great enemy is quantum decoherence: the thermal noise of the environment that, at room temperature, destroys quantum entanglement in times on the order of femtoseconds to picoseconds — between one quadrillionth and one trillionth of a second. The exact quantum information of 1986 doesn’t exist in any recoverable form in that sense. What does persist are classical traces: mechanical deformations, thermal alterations in materials, structural patterns that events left imprinted in matter.

An advanced quantum AI wouldn’t work with perfectly preserved quantum information. It would work like an archaeologist reconstructing an entire city from its foundations, its ash, and the direction in which its walls fell.

Armstrong’s footprint on the Moon

The Moon as Proof of Concept

Before reaching the scenario that matters emotionally, there’s a physical argument that deserves attention on its own terms, because it is the purest existing example of perfectly preserved historical information.

On July 20th, 1969, the Eagle module touched the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong descended the ladder and left a footprint in the regolith. That footprint is still there, with millimeter fidelity, exactly as it was left more than fifty years ago.

The reason is thermodynamic: the Moon has no atmosphere, no wind erosion, no water, no life. Entropy on its surface operates so slowly that physical patterns persist for millions of years without degrading. Armstrong’s footprints are, in the most literal sense, historical information perfectly preserved in matter.

This isn’t a metaphor. It’s the direct physical demonstration that events leave permanent traces in materials, and that those traces are recoverable as long as entropic agents — heat, water, life, time — haven’t erased them. What Quantum Archaeology proposes as theoretical hypothesis, the lunar surface demonstrates as everyday fact.

Earth’s problem isn’t that the information of the past has vanished. It’s that entropic agents have been working for millennia to make it unreadable. That’s where quantum computation would enter.

Knebworth 1986 – Freddie Mercury

Knebworth, August 9th, 1986

There is a historical irony that makes this example particularly apt for an essay about recovering what we believe is lost.

On August 9th, 1986, Queen played before 120,000 people at Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire, England. It was the band’s last concert with Freddie Mercury. The final show of what many consider the most powerful live rock lineup in history. Mercury would die five years later.

Nobody pressed record. No professional recording of the concert exists. There is only a Dutch bootleg of someone filming a screen from the back of the crowd — blurry, with distorted sound — and some amateur audio fragments. The biggest Queen concert in the UK, the end of an era, was lost. Clausius won that night.

Or perhaps not.

A contemporary classical AI would do what any documentary producer would: hunt down archival photos, gather testimonies from the 120,000 attendees, use recordings from other Magic Tour shows to infer the setlist and performance style. The result would be a narrative reconstruction. A story about that concert, not the concert itself.

A quantum AI working under the principles of what extreme computing theorists call Quantum Archaeology — the recovery of historical information through analysis of residual entanglement and physical deformations in materials — would operate in a radically different way:

The sound waves generated by Mercury’s voice, Brian May’s guitar, and the 8.6 kilometers of audio cable on stage — yes, that’s the actual production figure from Knebworth — collided against the Hertfordshire ground, the park’s trees, and the temporary stage structures for over two hours. Those mechanical collisions left micro-deformations in the crystalline lattice of the materials that persist decades later as patterns of residual stress, recoverable with sufficiently precise instrumentation. The photons emitted by the stage lights — 5,000 amplifiers illuminating Mercury in his cape and crown during the final encore — interacted with the atoms of the surrounding surfaces. The thermal alterations in the ground, in the structural wood, in the nearby trees, remain, in principle, legible.

The algorithm wouldn’t travel to 1986. It would read 1986 in the matter of 2025.

The result wouldn’t be an animation. It would be the mathematically most probable reconstruction of that night: the precise acoustics of the open field with the August wind in Hertfordshire, the exact frequencies of Mercury’s voice at its highest register, the oscillation of the ground with 120,000 people singing Radio Ga Ga with their arms raised. Not what someone remembers. What physically happened.

landauer tax

Landauer’s Tax: Why This Could Melt the Planet

Every trick played on the laws of the universe has a price. And this is where scientific honesty demands putting the actual numbers on the table, because numbers reveal the true scale of the problem.

In 1961, IBM physicist Rolf Landauer formulated a principle that connects computation with thermodynamics in a way nobody had anticipated: every time a computing system irreversibly erases or modifies a single bit of information, it dissipates a minimum, unavoidable amount of energy as heat. The formula is:

Where k_B is the Boltzmann constant (1.38 × 10⁻²³ J/K), T is the temperature of the system in Kelvin, and ln 2 is the natural logarithm of 2. At room temperature (T ≈ 300 K), the minimum cost per bit is approximately:

A ridiculously small number. The problem is the quantity of bits.

To simulate Knebworth with atomic precision during those two hours of concert — just the field, not the planet — we need to estimate how much information must be processed. Take a conservative volume: the field itself, roughly 1 km² of surface and 100 meters of air column above it, giving a total volume of about 10⁸ m³.

One cubic meter of air at atmospheric pressure contains approximately 2.7 × 10²⁵ molecules (derived from Avogadro’s number and the molar density of air at 300 K). For our total volume:

Describing the classical state of each molecule — position in three coordinates, velocity in three dimensions, plus rotational and vibrational state — requires conservatively on the order of 10² bits per molecule. That gives a minimum of:

Applying Landauer’s principle at room temperature:

287 terajoules. The energy equivalent of approximately 68 Hiroshima bombs, released as heat into our present just to process the air in a concert field. Without counting the ground, the structures, or the quantum error correction that would in practice push these numbers several orders of magnitude higher.

Scale to the entire planet and the numbers from Seth Lloyd’s seminal work in Nature in 2000 on the ultimate physical limits of computation give the framework: Earth contains approximately 10⁵⁰ atoms. Processing them with quantum precision would exceed the computational capacity of any physically possible machine within the limits of the observable universe.

Landauer’s paradox doesn’t kill the hypothesis. It defines it. What it says is this: a perfect atomic simulation of the terrestrial past is thermodynamically prohibitive. But a high-fidelity simulation of a bounded space — a field, a building, a concert hall — could, on a sufficiently distant technological horizon, carry a payable energy price.

The difference between “impossible” and “extremely expensive” is precisely where innovation lives.

simulation levels quantum

Three Levels of Simulation: An Honest Map

For this hypothesis to be scientifically useful rather than science fiction fantasy, it needs a clear frame of reference. Not all simulations of the past are equal. There are at least three levels with radically different physical and computational implications:

Level 1 — High-fidelity probabilistic simulation. Technologically achievable within decades. Doesn’t reconstruct the exact past, but the statistically most probable reconstruction given the maximum information available today. Uses advanced classical AI combined with materials analysis, archaeoacoustics, 3D reconstruction, and atmospheric modeling. The result is a simulation that 99% of observers couldn’t distinguish from the real event, but which contains irreducible uncertainties. It’s the difference between a photograph and a portrait.

Level 2 — Bounded quantum simulation. Horizon of decades to centuries. Requires quantum computing with advanced error correction and physical access to the materials of the location. Reconstructs events in limited spaces — a room, a field — with real physical fidelity, not statistical inference. The energy cost is prohibitive with current technology but violates no fundamental law. This is the Knebworth scenario.

Level 3 — Exact planetary atomic simulation. Thermodynamically prohibitive under Landauer and Lloyd’s calculations. Would require a computer whose mass would exceed the planet it’s attempting to simulate, and would generate more heat than Earth could dissipate. Not “impossible” in the sense of violating physical laws, but impossible in the sense that the conditions needed to build it would destroy the system we’re trying to preserve. It’s the observer paradox taken to its cosmological extreme.

Honest physics points to Level 2 as the real horizon of what might someday be possible.

Why This Matters Beyond Nostalgia

It might seem like the entire exercise is an intellectual indulgence: a team of people thinking about how to recover an 80s concert using theoretical physics. It isn’t.

The central hypothesis of this essay — that historical information persists in matter and that quantum computation could eventually read it — has consequences that extend far beyond entertainment archaeology.

There are unsolved crimes where the only silent witness is the molecular structure of a scene. There are political decisions whose consequences depend on reconstructing with precision what actually happened behind closed doors. There are diseases whose evolution might be understood if we could read the information they left in tissue before symptoms became visible. Quantum Archaeology, if it ever becomes technically viable, wouldn’t be a nostalgic technology. It would be a forensic technology of unprecedented power.

And there’s something more, perhaps the most important thing: understanding how information degrades — how entropy converts order into noise — is understanding one of the most fundamental processes in the universe. Not only in particle physics. In biology, in economics, in the data systems any organization manages every day. Whoever understands entropy understands how knowledge is lost. And whoever understands how it is lost can design better ways to preserve it.

In Not Nulled Labs, this space exists not to sell solutions that already exist, but to sit with problems that don’t have solutions yet. The Hybrid Core model isn’t a methodology. It’s a posture: humans who ask the questions machines alone would never think to ask, and AI that pressure-tests the answers with a rigor humans alone couldn’t sustain.

The DeLorean was made of steel. What comes next will be made of code.

References

Lesovik, G.B., Sadovskyy, I.A., Suslov, M.V., Lebedev, A.V., Vinokur, V.M. Arrow of time and its reversal on the IBM quantum computer. Scientific Reports, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-40765-6
Landauer, R. Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 1961. https://doi.org/10.1147/rd.53.0183
Lloyd, S. Ultimate physical limits to computation. Nature, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1038/35023282
Shannon, C.E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 1948.

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