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This question arose in me after watching https://youtu.be/mmtLgYVEuJs?t=394. The link has a time in it so it takes you to the part I am talking about in the video.

Qmechanic
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Quinten C
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1 Answers1

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The simple answer is "no", though it's an interesting question and there is more to it than this simple answer would suggest.

Matter and antimatter are related by a charge parity transformation, often abbreviated to $CP$. The charge transformation changes the sign of the charge, and the parity transformation is reflection in a mirror. So to change an electron into a positron you need to both change the charge from $-e$ to $+e$ and also swap the parity.

In the video you link the presenter shows how in two dimensions the letter R can be flipped by lifting it up out of the two dimensions and rotating it:

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This is indeed a parity transformation, so it does the $P$ part, and it would also work with a 3D object lifted into a fourth spatial dimension and rotated. However it wouldn't turn matter into antimatter because the process does not do the charge transformation.

John Rennie
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  • As for you last paragraph, this would be possible in any dimension: here you are looking for a rotation (determinant 1) in $\mathbb R^4$ that restricts to $(x,y,z,0)\mapsto (x,y,-z,0)$ (or any other element of $O(3)$ of determinant -1) on $\mathbb R^3 \times {0}$. This can be realized by moving through $(x,y,z,w)\mapsto(x,y,z\cos\alpha + w\sin\alpha, z\sin\alpha - w\cos\alpha)$ – doetoe Jun 03 '22 at 17:34
  • @doetoe Thanks, I'll update my answer :-) – John Rennie Jun 03 '22 at 17:52