"“Flipping” Time? Time Mirrors? What? Huh?" Topic

Did scientists just discover a way to reverse time (at least for photons)?
Here's the NY Post article, which reads like the old game of "telephone" where one person whispers something to another, and that person whispers it to a third, and you go until you reach the last person and he reveals what he heard and the original person reveals what she said, and the two are nothing alike.

link

I admit, I don't quite get it. I'm not certain the author does either.

But here's the article she was relying on and links in hers: link

Which still leaves me going, "what the heck are they saying happened?"

Here's the actual physics article abstract— and I have no idea what it's saying at all.

link

The only thing I can think is that they've somehow reversed a wave's movement or form through time… and yet, I have no idea what that would even mean, or what you'd be looking for to find it. Clearly it can't be time travel for the wave, or you'd see the effect of flipping before the thing was flipped. But what's left of that… I dunno. And I admit that everything I just said is probably wrong.

My brain is now fried. The only thing I'm certain of is that I have no idea what any of them are telling me, and not even sure that I ever would.

Let me know when I can return an overdue library book before it was due. That would be useful.

So going back in time to kill Hitler in the trenches is not quite feasible yet?

Time is not a thing, like space. We talk about moving through time, which is fine – the National Observatory can tell you when sunrise and sunset are based on your location even though everybody involved in the conversation realizes that there is a much more complex thing going on than one thing standing still and the other one rising or setting.

Time is a side effect of change. Changes in the state of things allow us to infer that "time is happening". This is core to relativity. Time doesn't dialate as you approach the speed of light; changes happen differently and you can measure the difference between how those changes happen and how changes for slower things do.

I am not familar with a lot of what is in the article, but I do understand a little bit about Floquet conversion of signals. The metameterials they talk about change the rate of change of the signals, instead of the amplitude or direction. How this happens can be controlled by energy state, instead of physical configuration of structure as hapens for amplitude or direction control. This makes things like bandpass filters more agile since you are not changing the shape or internal structure of the filter, just its energy state.

There's a mathier way to say that, but I have to go look that up in a book if I want to get it right.

The effect they are discussing just changes a more fundamental behaviour of an energy signal in a way that is easier to control. It does not send things back in time, no matter what a TikTokker says.