Disclaimer: my knowledge of physics is at best at a dilettante level, even with more than a year of the topic in college, one elective course of which got me one of the only two B letter grades of both of my degrees. (Statistics similarly defeated me.)
I've read that there is no variable for time in the equations used in quantum physics, no t, because (apparently) time doesn't play a role. That's why quantum effects that are visible at the macroscopic level - even something as simple as stuff that absorbs light to glow in the dark - are random processes time-wise.
Yet time t plays a crucial role at the macroscopic level, in classical, or "Newtonian", mechanics.
Not only that, time is malleable, in the sense that it is affected by velocity and acceleration (special relativity) and gravity (general relativity), effects that are not only measurable, but stuff we depend on every day (like GPS) have to make adjustments for it.
So suppose God has a dial that controls the scale of their point of view, all the way from the smallest sub-atomic scale we know of, the Planck length, to the largest cosmological scale we know of, the observable Universe. At some point as God turns this dial on their heavenly tele/micro/scope, zooming out, out, far out, time goes from not being a factor at all to being an intrinsic factor for whatever they’re looking at.
Does this transition happen all at once? Does it happen gradually - somehow - in some kind of jittery change? What the heck is going on in this transition? What other things similarly change at this transition point? Is this the point at which particle-wave duality breaks down? Where Schrödinger's Cat definitely becomes alive or dead? Where does gravity starts to matter?
Gravity? Yeah, gravity. Because we currently have no theory of quantum gravity. Yet it seems necessary that at the quantum level gravity ought to play a role in a wave/particle. If a particle is in a super-position of states, what does that say about the gravitational attraction associated with the mass of this particle? At what point on the dial does gravity make a difference? There's a Nobel prize for sure for the first person to make significant progress on this question.
This is the kind of thing I think about while eating breakfast.
1 comment:
Time certainly has been present in the mathematical description of the quantum world from the get go, e.g. in the time dependent Schroedinger equation, and its relativistic counterpart, the Dirac equation. What I think you are getting at though is the question of how quantum effects transition to the Newtonian: I.e. why can’t we walk through two doors simultaneously and cast an interference pattern on the other side? The answer is the constant on the time dependent part of the equations that sets the time dependent part called h (Planck constant) is very small. 6e^-34 joule*sec. The value of this constant has no explanation in Physics (AFAIK) but seems to me to function as “God’s control knob” that moves us between the two set of rules as the systems scale changes.
Post a Comment