Agreed on the first point, the headline and lead-in are grossly sensationalized, but later they do pretty clearly explain what’s going on.
The article’s author says the “time mirror” means you send a signal into the experimental setup of wave guides e.g. “a-b-c” and it comes back “c-b-a”.
Furthermore, when the researchers introduce interference during the reversal they don’t see superposition as you might expect (wave-like behavior), but kinetic interactions (signals are acting like a collection of particles).
It may not be true (we know a large percentage of papers can’t be replicated I.e. they’re bullshit), and I have no context to know how important that finding would be, but it is explained.
> The article’s author says the “time mirror” means you send a signal into the experimental setup of wave guides e.g. “a-b-c” and it comes back “c-b-a”.
It would be great if the author said that. She doesn’t say that, though. She says, “For instance, what is at the beginning of the original signal will be at the end of the reflected signal — a situation akin to looking at yourself in a mirror and seeing the back of your head.”
Which is a surprising thing for a person with a PhD in nanophotonics to say.
Maybe I’m missing the importance of this happening in this experiment specifically, but isn’t this already a known phenomena seen in the double-slit experiment?
> Just a few months after developing the device, Alù and his colleagues observed more surprising behavior when they tried creating a time reflection in that waveguide while shooting two beams of light at each other inside it. Normally colliding beams of light behave as waves, producing interference patterns where their overlapping peaks and troughs add up or cancel out like ripples on water (in “constructive” or “destructive” interference, respectively). But light can, in fact, act as a pointlike projectile, a photon, as well as a wavelike oscillating field—that is, it has “wave-particle duality.” Generally a particular scenario will distinctly elicit just one behavior or the other, however. For instance, colliding beams of light don’t bounce off each other like billiard balls! But according to Alù and his team’s experiments, when a time reflection occurs, it seems that they do.
The article’s author says the “time mirror” means you send a signal into the experimental setup of wave guides e.g. “a-b-c” and it comes back “c-b-a”.
Furthermore, when the researchers introduce interference during the reversal they don’t see superposition as you might expect (wave-like behavior), but kinetic interactions (signals are acting like a collection of particles).
It may not be true (we know a large percentage of papers can’t be replicated I.e. they’re bullshit), and I have no context to know how important that finding would be, but it is explained.