I've fiddled with these thoughts for nearly a decade now. I've considered their value, and if I'm correct, it's inestimable. If wrong, well, nothing lost. I'm bored with them, however - if I AM correct, I'm too far ahead of modern physics to be able to do anything meaningful to advance the ideas. I need more anomalies.
So, Orphan Wilde, who makes no claim to being a studied physicist, on quantum mechanics.
First, it's not the observed which is uncertain, it's the observer. The earth isn't the center of the universe, nor is the sun, nor is our galaxy; nor are we the center of certainty. Our minds behave the way they do because they are four dimensional - and one of the products of this is that our observations are skewed across a chunk of probability-space. We can't isolate these values because they can't be isolated; the particles are real, Einstein was correct, we're just observing a larger bandwidth of them than the single probability-moment that we think we do, which leads us into crazy conclusions about the way matter "really" works.
The process of observation represents a movement of our minds, not the universe. Relativity and causality are maintained.
And an interesting side effect of this is that our brains are effectively quantum computers. Cool, huh? Also, free will is a product of this. But don't expect that to mean anything to you; your past choices are permanent. And if that statement makes sense to you you should see a shrink.
Second, gravity is a wave. It's a wave which propagates along space-time it has already bent, more; this produces a steeper gradient closer to mass, and a shallower gradient further from mass, producing the illusion of a wave which slows down as it escapes matter. This is the grand unified theory, in case you're wondering; gravity is one side of this gradient, the cosmological constant is the next side over, when the gradient is positive. Atomic configurations are the product of gravity flipping one way and the other. It also produces bizarre space-time curves around black holes, but that's nothing new.
Third, quantum mechanics is fundamentally wrong; energy doesn't come in discrete packets, it forms a continuum. The finite set of stable configurations of matter in a closed system produces the illusion of discrete packets; until and unless energy accumulates in sufficient quantities to shift to another stable configuration, the configuration remains identical. Shifts from one stable configuration to another produce predictable energy emissions, producing the illusion of discrete packets.
Fourth, entropic interactions reverse themselves according to the direction of gravity. Five years ago I had a clearer idea what this meant. Today I'm less certain; it was an important idea to me then, however, so I'm writing it down.
Fifth, the big bang never happened. I don't have any evidence of this, but it seems a natural progression of the past thousand years of science, in which each center of the universe in turn was proven to be just another unexceptional point. Anytime somebody claims there's an exceptional spot in the universe fix them with a steely gaze and ask "Really? Another?"
I've taken five courses on quantum mechanics. (Even supposedly passed four of them.)
ReplyDeleteNeither are actually 'uncertain.' The uncertainty principle has a terrible name. In practice, if you know a particle's speed, it's not that you don't know it's position, it's that it doesn't have a position. They can't be meaningfully defined simultaneously. This is because particles are waves. To pin down a wave's velocity, you need an exact frequency, which means you need an infinite standing wave, which obviously has no centre and thus no position per se. Conversely, to pin down its position, you restrict it to essentially one pulse, and that pulse has significant components at every frequency, so again with the infinities.
The 'uncertainty' principle is just the mathematical statement of how the meaningfulness of position varies with speed. Thing is, the wavefunction, from which both are derived, is not uncertain nor indeterministic nor in any sense meaningless.
The particle-wave duality explanation of quantum behavior is only one of several. Feynman's sum of all histories doesn't strictly express particles as waves, for example, and is compatible (albeit in a disjointed way) with real particles. Everett's model also permits non-wave particles; mine can be treated as a derivative of both Everett's and Feynman's models, combining their practical explanations into a five-dimensional model.
ReplyDeleteYou're correct that "certainty" is a poor word to express the concept as relates to the more commonly accepted models of quantum physics, but none of the current set of models has been either proven or disproven. The closest we've come is that the LHC -didn't- verify a prediction string theory made, which is weak evidence against it.