IS IT POSSIBLE FOR TIME INVERSION?

 

 In a recent movie titled ‘Tenet’, which was directed by world’s famous director Christopher Nolan, explains about a concept called “Time inversion”. Is it possible to do time inversion? Let’s see about that in this article.

What is Time Inversion?

Time inversion (also called as Time reversal) is an actual concept to believe that nature was characterized by symmetries in a mirror world where time moves backwards. It was initially believed that the physical laws would apply if right and left were reversed and matter was replaced with antimatter. But, Fitch and James Cronin’s discoveries in 1964 proved that, “symmetry does not apply during time reversal” and “reactions going backward in time are not identical to those going forward”.

 

 

Entropy with Time Inversion:

Entropy is the concept about the movement of the objects. Sometimes it was called as an arrow of time. According to second law of thermodynamics, “the entropy of an isolated systems can increase, but not decrease”. The ability to reverse entropy is what causes time inversion. When you are inverted, you move backwards in time. For your perception, you are moving as normal, while rest of the world is moving reverse.

T-symmetry:

It is the theoretical symmetry of physical laws under the transformation of time reversal,

                      T : t à -t

Time is said to be non-symmetric or asymmetric, except for special equilibrium states when the second law of thermodynamics predicts the time symmetry to hold. However, quantum noninvasive measurements are predicted to violate time symmetry even in equilibrium, contrary to their classical counterparts, although this has not to be experimentally confirmed.

Time Reversal Invariance:

If a physical process is allowed to reverse itself by the laws of nature, then it is said to be time reversal invariant. According to the simplest view, to reverse a process it suffices to reverse the order of the instantaneous states of the process. That is what exactly happens when we play the film of a macroscopic process in reverse, for example the collision of two billiard balls. In this case, both what the film and the film played in reverse show are allowed by laws of classical mechanics, and by just watching the films we cannot say which is the real process and which is its reverse. Each is the reverse of the other, and both are equally plausible under normal conditions. 

Quantum Mechanics:

Quantum mechanics as a microscopic theory of explaining the physical reality is much more complex than classical mechanics and thermodynamics. It results in what may appear to be some very strange conclusions about the physical world. Unlike classical mechanics, we cannot easily imagine if it is invariant under time reversal, and also contrary to thermodynamics, we cannot observe its temporal asymmetric behavior in everyday life. But we are very curious to know what really happens in quantum mechanics under time reversal transformation. 

There are three myths for time reversal in quantum mechanics : 

 

 

                                             M. Naveenkumar

                                                      S. Sakthikumar