The Anti-time/Anti-matter Controversy

"Anti-matter looks like matter going backwards in time," is a quote I've been hearing lately. Here's a question that popped into my head: What does matter going back in time look like? The typical response is it looks like a rewinding video. However, if matter truly goes back in time it would simply vanish or would exist in the past, not the present or future. It would be unobservable. All we can see is it going in the opposite direction in forward time.

Case and point: positrons have been experimentally trapped for as long as 16 minutes. How is that possible if they go back in time? To exist for 16 minutes, they have to go forward in time for 16 minutes. If you ask me, anti-matter looks like matter with an opposite charge--FULL STOP.

Reverse time comes with its own set of problems. Click here to read about those. Not withstanding these problems, a case can be made for reverse time that doesn't take you back to your high school reunion. I call it anti-time.

Anti-time does not take you to the past, but rather, it makes the past possible. If there was no anti-time there would be nothing to cancel the current moment in time. The moments would pile up. You would not only be living in the present moment, but all your past moments as well. All your memories would be all too real. Hopefully, for your sake, they are good memories.

To demonstrate how anti-time works, let's start with a time-moment represented by an arrow:

The plus sign indicates that it is a positive, forward time-moment. The time-line arrow to the right is how we normally think of time: just a straight line going up in this instance. Now let's add a second time-moment and see what happens:

The first time-moment is canceled by an anti-time-moment (arrow pointing down). That leaves us with the present moment. We get a similar result when another time-moment is added:

But why isn't there an anti-time arrow to cancel the current time-moment? Well, at the beginning of time, there was no past, so time could only go forward, but once it went forward a little, there was some room to go back and still room to go forward--so we get a forward arrow followed by a backward arrow and another forward arrow, etc. As a result, we get time that has a forward bias.

This is a pretty bizarre theory! Can it be tested? Sure. Ask yourself, "Is history history or is it still happening?" If history is history, obviously something is cancelling those time-moments that would otherwise pile up. In mathematics we use a minus sign to cancel a plus sign, so it stands to reason that -time cancels +time leaving us only with the present.