Researchers just now have found that it’s possible to speed up, slow down, or reverse the flow of time in a quantum system. This isn’t exactly time travel but is instead implementing or reverting to different quantum states from different points in time frames.

An international team of scientists claim to have found a way to speed up, slow down, and even reverse the clock of a given system by taking advantage of the unusual properties of the quantum world, Spanish newspaper El País reports.

In a series of six papers, the team from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna detailed their findings. The familiar laws of physics don’t map intuitively onto the subatomic world, which is made up of quantum particles called qubits that can technically exist in more than one state simultaneously, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.

Now, the researchers say they’ve figured out how to turn these quantum particles’ clocks forward and backward.

“In a theatre, [classical physics], a movie is projected from beginning to end, regardless of what the audience wants,” Miguel Navascués, a researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information who worked on the research, told El País.

“But at home [the quantum world], we have a remote control to manipulate the movie,” he added. “We can rewind to a previous scene or skip several scenes.

ime goes in one direction: forward. Little boys become old men but not vice versa; teacups shatter but never spontaneously reassemble. This cruel and immutable property of the universe called the “arrow of time,” is fundamentally a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that systems will always tend to become more disordered over time. But recently, researchers from the U.S. and Russia have bent that arrow just a bit — at least for subatomic particles.

In the new study, published Tuesday (Mar. 12) in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers manipulated the arrow of time using a very tiny quantum computer made of two quantum particles, known as qubits, that performed calculations. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]

At the subatomic scale, where the odd rules of quantum mechanics hold sway, physicists describe the state of systems through a mathematical construct called a wave function. This function is an expression of all the possible states the system could be in — even, in the case of a particle, all the possible locations it could be in — and the probability of the system being in any of those states at any given time. Generally, as time passes, wave functions spread out; a particle’s possible location can be farther away if you wait an hour than if you wait 5 minutes.

Does this mean the researchers made a time machine? Did they violate the laws of physics? The answer is no to both of those questions. The second law of thermodynamics says that the order of the universe must decrease over time but that it can never stay the same in very special cases. This experiment was small enough, short enough and controlled enough that the universe neither gained nor lost energy.

“It is very complex and complicated to send waves on a pond back” once they’ve been created, Vinokur said, “but we saw that this was possible in the quantum world, in a very simple case.” In other words, it was possible when they used the control given to them by the quantum computer to undo time’s effect.