'Time Reflections' Finally Observed by Physicists After Decades of Searching

hubie writes:

Reflections in time instead of space:

Walk through a maze of mirrors, you'll soon come face to face with yourself. Your nose meets your nose, your fingertips touch at their phantom twins, stopped abruptly by a boundary of glass.

Most of the time, a reflection needs no explanation. The collision of light with the mirror's surface is almost intuitive, its rays set on a new path through space with the same ease as a ball bouncing off a wall.

For over sixty years, however, physicists have considered a subtly different kind of reflection. One that occurs not through the three dimensions of space, but in time.

Now researchers from the City University of New York's Advanced Science Research Center (CUNY ASRC) have turned the theory of 'time reflections' into practice, providing the first experimental evidence of its manipulation across the electromagnetic spectrum.

[...] Put aside thoughts of TARDIS-like technologies rewriting history. This kind of time reflection is even weirder. And, it seems, actually possible after all.

By the 1970s, it was becoming clear that there was an analog for spatial reflection in the time component of a quantum wave of light. Change the medium a wave is traveling through quickly enough, in just the right way, and the temporal component of the wave will change with it.

The effect of this reflection in time isn't going to rip a hole in reality. But It will shift the frequency of the wave, in ways technology could exploit across varied fields like imaging, analogue computing, and optical filtering.

Strangely, the 'echo' of altered frequency is also a reversal of the signal. If it was an echo of your voice counting one to ten, you'd hear each number spoken backwards, from ten back to one, in a chipmunk squeak.

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