Time is like a clock that never stops. It keeps going forward, and we can’t make it go back. But some scientists from Germany and Denmark found something really amazing: in some materials, tiny parts of them can act like time is going backward!
The scientists studied things like glass. Glass isn’t like other solid stuff. It’s made of super tiny pieces that are all jumbled up, kind of like a messy toy box. Over time, these pieces slowly move and settle into a new spot, like toys being put away. This is called “aging.”
Usually, when things change, they can’t go back. For example, if you break an egg and make it into scrambled eggs, you can’t turn it back into a whole egg again. This happens because of a rule called entropy. It says that things get messier and more mixed up as time goes on.
But glass is special. The tiny bits inside glass can move in a funny way. They wiggle and push each other around, sometimes moving forward and sometimes moving back. If you recorded these movements with a camera and played the video backward, it would look the same as playing it forward!
The scientists wanted to figure out how this works, but it wasn’t easy. Glass changes so slowly that it’s hard to watch it closely. So, they used special lasers and cameras to look at the tiny wiggling bits inside three different kinds of glass.
What they found was super cool. The tiny bits of glass don’t follow the same rules as other things. They move like little dancers, going back and forth without caring about time. But even though these tiny movements seem to go backward, the glass as a whole still ages and settles down, just like other things do.
So, while we can’t make time go backward, these tiny parts of glass show us that time isn’t always as simple as it seems.
