Light Can Go Backwards Through Time, And This Experiment Proves It

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That must be why my mother hated it when I used to turn the lights off and on in quick succession. I risked sending the house back in time. That would explain our dated home decor.

It’s a very popular misconception that light acts different when we are watching it. It doesn’t and it doesn’t care. It acts differently when we MEASURE it because in order to measure light we have to interact with it in some way. It’s this interaction that changes the quantum properties of light not the observation.

its so annoying when people say it behaves different when you look at it, it doesn't. in order to "look at it" you need to interact with it in some way, ofcourse you get a different result by interacting with it.

the mexican wave explanation is so good! Thank you for your video. Sometimes it's hard to remember core concepts when you're so overwhelmed with all of the formulas and exercices. This has made it intuitive for me again!

Einstein liked boating and in his personal papers often refers to him just lying in the boat and dipping his finger in the water and watching the waves spread out. He also would look at others doing the same and noticed that no matter if he was looking at his wave or someone else’s wave he noticed that the waves produced by him or the other travelled at the same speed no matter how fast either boat travelled. He also noticed that no matter how fast he made the boat travel or how fast he dipped his finger in the water or how big of a drop he made the speed of the wave never changed it remained constant. Shortly after he wrote 2 papers. Photoelectric effect and special relativity. Cool eh!!!

There's definitely something deeper going on with light, space, and time that is even more fantastic than we can imagine. Maybe we're on the verge of a new century of physics.

4:41 I was just wondering how slow you could get it to get. WOW 0 THAT'S GODLY!!

I’ve known this for much longer than scientist. The moment I learned that due to relativity that time is a constant and we cannot exceed it’s speed in a vacuum I simply thought “Nuh Uh”. Where is my Nobel Prize?

I have often wondered about this when I am in a queue of cars waiting for the traffic light to change. I often see the light changes to green long before the first driver moves.😃

I read the paper and a couple explanatory articles, none of them have photons going back in time.

There is “diffraction” through the temporal slit, which alters the frequency (and wavelength) of the light reflected off the pulsing mirror. There is also a very tiny time gap between the first and second pulse.

To my understanding, the light is “schmeared” through time. The overlap in this “schmear” over the tiny gap in time between the first and second pulse results in interference.

Because the diffraction occurs over the frequency, the end result is that some frequencies are constructively and deconstructively interfering.

None of this requires backwards in time effects, which would break causality (which quantum physics obeys).

As a point about your time-space diagrams, If you position your receivers and mirrors at higher points in the graph, you will see that light doesn’t need to speed up; it can just slow down instead. This prevents the impression of light going into the past, but preserves the ability for inference. Drawing analogy to the original double slit, photons going through the time slit should have a certain amount of uncertainty as to which “slit” they will go through, but the photon must still obey causality.

The Heisenberg uncertainty equation is usually written as (delta-x)(delta-p)>h/2*pi but you can also easily rearrange the Heisenberg equation so that, rather than position and momentum, it instead refers to energy and time. That is (delta-E)(delta-t) on the left side but remember that a photon's frequency is directly proportional to its energy (E=hf). So, in the traditional double slit experiment the delta-x is confined to one of two slits so the uncertainty in the lateral momentum must increase (two probability waves spread out and form a spacial interference pattern). From the (delta-E)(delta-t) point of view if you confine the (delta-t) to two time slits, then a similar thing must happen except now the two uncertainty "waves" are in the E=hf frequency. This creates two interfering frequencies and the associated beat pattern that is observed.

seems to be a major oversight in this study, and that is a pretty simple one, indium tin oxide cannot change state faster than the speed of light... the entire phenomenon of the experiment can be explained by light traveling through the indium during is phase change

I have to be honest. The quanta phenomena that you are describing is sometimes hard for me to conceptualise. Like light travelling through supercooled sodium atoms, I’ll get there eventually…..
What I really love is that our assumptions and understanding is constantly evolving, that there is always something new to discover. As a 62year old who’s lived a life, I can’t tell you how reinvigorated and inspired you make me feel!

I'm no scientist myself, but I reckon—given the brevity of a femtosecond—that this interference might be attributable to things like internal refraction within the sensor, or the density of air within the testing chamber. The more refraction is possible, the less it can be ignored…

This was my favorite experience on Astrum yet. Granted I don't frequent the channel as much as I'd like. But the gorgeous soothing music, the compelling new information about something that affects us all so profoundly; light. I'm blown away by how good this video is. Yes please, more of this. I love how aware you are at how enjoyable this style of education is too. That you understand it's just as wonderful to fall asleep to, to dream about as you drift away, as it is to experience fully alert. I feel more likely to re-watch this too, because there's SO much info here. And I want to take it all in more.
A million thank yous! Keep it up, Astrum <3

The indium-tin oxide does not stop been reflective at the speed of light. So is not like 1 or 0. What you see when at the end of the experiment is not going faster than speed or traveling back in time, is just that the First pulse is still been partially reflecting at a lower intensity at the moment the second is activated to be reflected.

This was one of your all-time best videos. More like this please; less flash and more fact. Bravo!

Regarding the time slit stuff, I think this can be easier to understand if you remember that there is a time/frequency uncertainty (much like the position/momentum uncertainty). As a result, the more accurately you know when a photon arrives, the less accurately you know it's frequency. Thus if a photon could have arrived via two different narrow time windows, there are two different frequency distributions that it must exhibit and it's those frequencies that (I think) are interfering. (And yes, that's grossly over simplified.)

14:09 this resembles a video of a lightning in a super slow motion - it does the same, various branches search for shortest way to grounded point to make a discharge.