Thread: ramifications of reversing handedness of matter

Hi, I was reading some HG wells, where a character is rotated on an axis perpindicular to the three large spatial degrees of freedom, and was wondering what the ramifications of this would be on matter.
Would the chiral inversion of matter on a molecular level create antimatter?
What would the ramifications be to reverse the weak force's parity violation so that it only acted on right handed partcicles instead of left handed ones?
Does DNA reproduce the same way if its spiral shape is inverted?
Also, is it true that the enzymes in the digestive process depend on handedness, so that someone inverted along a hypothetical axis perpindular to our three spatial degrees of freedom (as in HG Well's story) wouldn't be able to digest food?

It seems that you're confusing concepts.


The 'handedness' of organic molecules refers to the relative position of groups around a chiral centre. Rotating the molecule, or each atom seperately, will not affect this positioning, in the same way that you can digest while facing both North and South.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_%28chemistry%29


Rotating something about a 4th spatial dimension is too abstract to describe, since we're accustomed to thinking in just 3. However if this dimension were spatial, the result of this rotation would be that you are facing the opposite direction in this fourth dimension, with no physical effect in the other 3 (since the position, order, energies, etc. of your molecules has not been changed in the usual 3 dimensions).

On the other hand, if you think of the fourth dimension as being time; a particle moving forwards in time acts exactly the same as it's antiparticle moving backwards through time.


Hope some of this helps; I'm not too sure what you're trying to ask.

Thanks for the feedback Drowsy Turtle. I am interested in the effects of a large fourth spatial dimension, and was just trying to imagine the effects of laterally inverting matter into its 'mirror image', so that a right handed person might still believe they're right handed, when they appear to be lefthanded to people observing them. I think i am confusing concepts.
Anyway if you could please answer this I'd be thankful:
if you were able to look at an electron in a mirror would it look like a positron?

No. It would look like an electron with its spin reversed.

Thanks for the feedback