Physicists confirm the incredible existence of "time mirrors"

For decades, theoretical physicists tossed around the idea that time reflection, also known as “time mirrors,” might one day be demonstrated in a real-world experiment.  This idea seemed too big and wild, yet it kept popping up in serious discussions of quantum mechanics where equations hinted at surprising behavior.

A team led by Hady Moussa from the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) in New York City has now confirmed that these mysterious events actually exist.

They pulled off a successful test by changing the properties of a device in a quick, uniform way so that signals reversed direction in time.

Understanding time mirrors
This sort of time flip has been described as looking into a mirror and spotting your back instead of your face. It sounds like science fiction, but it has a basis in real physics.

Researchers had predicted for more than 50 years that sudden shifts in a wave’s environment could trigger such reversals.

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Time Reflections

The explanation of spatial reflections—whether by light or by sound—are pretty intuitive. Electromagnetic radiation in the form of light or sound waves hit a mirror or wall, respectively, and change course. 

This allows our eyes to see a reflection or echo of the original input. However, for more than 50 years, scientists have theorized that there’s another kind of reflection in quantum mechanics known as time reflection.

This term might conjure up images of a nuclear-powered DeLorean or a particular police box (that’s bigger on the inside), but that’s not quite what scientists mean by the term. 

Instead, time reflections occur when the entire medium in which an electromagnetic wave travels suddenly changes course. This causes a portion of that wave to reverse and its frequency transforms into another one.

Because these time reflections require a uniform variation across an entire electromagnetic field, scientists assumed it would require too much energy to actually observe time reflections in action. 

But scientists from the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) in New York City successfully observed time reflections by sending broadband signals into a strip of metal filled with electronic switches that were connected to reservoir capacitors.  READ MORE...