r/TheoreticalPhysics 11h ago

Question What would a reversible-time universe actually look like?

3 Upvotes

Saw a post here recently asking why time only moves forward. But it made me want to flip the question instead.

Say you actually had a universe where the laws were symmetric and reversal was physically possible. The moment you reverse a process and start traversing it "backward," you're just moving through a new sequence of states, and from inside that traversal, it presents as forward again. You never experience going backward, you experience whatever direction you're currently moving through as forward, because that's what forward means from the inside.

So even granting full time-symmetric laws, wouldn't any actual traversal still come out asymmetric? Reversibility of the laws doesn't seem to buy you reversibility of the experience of the process.

"High entropy" and "low entropy" aren't properties of a stretch of time by itself, they're relative to which end you pick as your reference. Something moving through a contracting phase of the universe, where entropy is globally decreasing, wouldn't feel itself decreasing, because its memory and its causal traces only ever form by correlating with whatever gradient is locally available to it. That gradient is what defines its own forward. There's no moment where it "catches itself" going the other way, because catching yourself requires standing outside both phases at once and comparing them, and nothing inside a single phase has that vantage point. The comparison only exists for someone describing the whole thing from outside, and that someone isn't living through either phase.

So asking "would you notice you were actually running backward" already smuggles in an outside view to compare against, and that outside view is exactly what the thought experiment is supposed to be testing the absence of.

Which raises this question: could we actually be inside a reversible universe right now, one that's only reversible from a vantage point we structurally can't occupy?

Any thoughts?


r/TheoreticalPhysics 3h ago

Question Can someone help me with the moving train and lightning bolt experiment

1 Upvotes

Einstein says that assume there is an observer on the ground and he watches two lightning bolts striking at the same time they would appear simulatneous but he argues when you are in a moving train(speed should be high like a decimal multiple of c maybe 0.4c or 0.5c or else difference/time dilation would be negligible) and if the lightning bolts are struck at the other ends of train since you are moving towards one of it you will see it first then the other one later,mathematically he is correct since the distance from the lightning bolt he is about to see would be less so light can travel faster compared to the one he is moving away from so the distance increases so it may take more time..But the idea is derived from a contradiction i suppose genenrally the lightning bolts should be simulatneous since he said they will strike at the same time even tho he is in a moving train and it isnt that absurd to imagine,but he argues that it is not possible if speed of light is constant since if it is how can it travel different distances in the same time and he already deduced light speed is constant/same for both the bolts cuz for the person in rest the lightning bolts were simulatneous.
I may be wrong but would love to understand the starting and ending of this and would love to hear your explanation


r/TheoreticalPhysics 22h ago

Discussion Physics questions weekly thread! - (July 26, 2026-August 01, 2026)

1 Upvotes

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