High School How do we know what would happen if time reversed?

Click For Summary
Sean Carroll's lectures highlight the CPLEAR experiment, which indicates that weak interactions differ when time is reversed. However, the assumption that reversing a particle interaction equates to actual time reversal is questioned. There is uncertainty about whether kaons would convert to anti-kaons at the same rate if time were truly reversed. The discussion emphasizes that this assumption lacks empirical support, as it presumes no other changes occur during the reversal. Ultimately, the complexities of time reversal in physics remain unresolved.
olamosey
Messages
7
Reaction score
1
TL;DR
The weak interactions are different going forward and going backwards in time. But how can we know this, since we can’t actually reverse time?
In Sean Carroll's lectures Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time, he talks about the the CPLEAR experiment, which showed that the weak interactions are different going forward and going backwards in time. But it seems like there is a big assumption: reversing a particle interaction means that it is happening backwards in time. But it isn't, no time reversal is actually happening. How do we know that if we could actually reverse time, we would see kaons turning into anti-kaons at the same rate?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
olamosey said:
How do we know that if we could actually reverse time, we would see kaons turning into anti-kaons at the same rate?
We don't. You are correct in that there is an assumption that nothing else changes when we 'reverse' time.
 

Thread 'Is this a coincidence?... (distances between planets)'

I'm not a student or graduate in Astrophysics.. Wish i were though... I was playing with distances between planets... I found that Mars, Ceres, Jupiter and Saturn have somthing in common... They are in a kind of ratio with another.. They all got a difference about 1,84 to 1,88x the distance from the previous planet, sub-planet. On average 1,845x. I thought this can be coincidential. So i took the big moons of Jupiter and Saturn to do the same thing jupiter; Io, Europa and Ganymede have a...
View full post »

Similar threads

Undergrad Musings, seeking opinions about the nature of time
  • · Replies 1 ·
Replies
1
Views
1K
High School How do we know our laws of physics are correct?
  • · Replies 35 ·
2
Replies
35
Views
6K
High School Can Time Truly Flow Backwards in Quantum Physics and Cosmology?
  • · Replies 51 ·
2
Replies
51
Views
5K
High School How do physicists know that the past is immutable?
  • · Replies 4 ·
Replies
4
Views
2K
High School Time-reversal of an unknown quantum state
  • · Replies 1 ·
Replies
1
Views
2K
Undergrad Feynman's reversible and irreversible machines
  • · Replies 5 ·
Replies
5
Views
5K
Undergrad Decoherence and time reversal asymmetry
  • · Replies 4 ·
Replies
4
Views
2K
How do we measure that two objects can have different time?
  • · Replies 18 ·
Replies
18
Views
2K
High School Black Holes & Time: How Do We Observe Movement?
  • · Replies 7 ·
Replies
7
Views
2K
Undergrad Time series and why would we remove seasonality and trend?
  • · Replies 10 ·
Replies
10
Views
3K