Spacetime is Doomed - and Quantum Mechanics too
Recently I again beat my head on the brick wall of my incomprehension of physics in a comment to @por500bolos, who has some competence in the field. Rather than pointing out how dumb I am, he kindly refrained, yet I was bitten once again by the frustration of my failure to resolve relativity and quantum mechanics. I guess I'm not alone. No one I am aware of claims to have resolved them credibly. Hunting for more information, I was alerted to the title of a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed at PSW Science, 'The Doom of Spacetime'.
IMG source - Macleans.ca - The Future of the Universe
I am deeply gratified now to be even more out of my depth, as his attempt at resolution seems beyond my ken, and I can make little of the geometric structures he claims underlie both spacetime and quantum mechanics, that emerge from the relationships of the faces, spaces, and vertices of his diagrams.
Just so I won't be the only one on Hive completely baffled, I have endeavored to share the talk here, on Hive. It's a couple hours, complete with the Q&A afterwards, which I quite enjoy and am glad was left in. I hope folks with a passing interest in physics that grasp the problem with resolving classical and quantum physics enjoy the reduction of both to an emergence from Nima's novel geometry.
If you are fascinated by bright, shiny objects like I am, PSW provides an application for membership and a very strong program of talks that range across the sciences. I'm like an addict that has been trapped in a crack house time loop on their site. You just might enjoy it too.
you cannot resolve wrong models
also models, especially wrong ones, are not reality
greets :)
There is a sense in which models cannot be right, because they aren't reality, but models. Maths can only refer to reality. It is a form of speech about it, and like all speech, can only partially accurately refer to reality and must, at some point, diverge from the reality that is being described.
Just as our understanding can only be partial, even though we can reach 12 decimals of accuracy, in fundamental ways we cannot precisely know anything accurately, as Nima points out as the problem we have precisely characterizing reality.
Thanks!
Quantum Mechanics is still trying to work with tiny balls of stuff, whereas their experiments are showing that it isn't, unless people are actively trying to look for tiny balls of stuff.
Space-time may not exist. Time is not a dimension like space.
When trying to take very high speed photos of our world, you get really weird images.
If you look at Kozyrev's experiments with time, you find that the stuff is not linear and can be effected.
(these are experiments that you can repeat yourself)
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev should have an entire science class on his theories and experiments. A full semester just on those. Einstein should be a footnote.
Here is one of Kozyrev's experiments:
Take a block of steel (works with most metals/solids) weigh it
Then, without letting it ground out (touched by human hand, touch metal... keep it on a rubber matt)
Shake it vigorously, like putting it in a paint shaker.
Put it back on the scale (no touching)
And the weight is much different. And not minutely different.
Time is basically change. Yet it can be considered as a dimension in a Minkowski space, for example. Essentially, however, change occurs over time, so the more time that has passed between measurements, the more the measurements will change. Nothing can occur in space without time passing.
Steel changing due to shaking is a strange property. I am baffled by what change could be instigated in steel by such action.
Thanks!
Well, the steel changing due to shaking is due to time.
It is one of the time experiments Kozyrev has done.
This appears to be incorrect.
At least in a linear time model.
If you think about teleportation. An item being one place, and then another. What happens to the linear time-space model?
Or what about objects that are in several places at once?
Time may actually be pulses, in which the universe is recreated trillions of time a second.
Time, would thus be the energy that creates life.
There is no such thing as teleportation, or things that exist in multiple places at once.
Regarding the universe being created over and over, that would require that the universe be destroyed each time, and that isn't happening. That being said, there may be multiple universes, and I am incompetent to say there is or isn't.
There are claims of quantum teleportation, but that only involves information, not mass or energy, which doesn't violate the speed of light. The warping of spacetime is information, at least in part, and doesn't require time to effect. As mass moves spacetime warps without delay across the full extent of the universe. Gravity is instant, not taking time to travel like forces/mass, because the shape of spacetime doesn't have to travel to spacetime to change it's shape. It is everywhere spacetime is. It doesn't have to go there.
Dear @valued-customer !
I remember that Einstein died while working on a unified field theory that could reconcile his theory of relativity with quantum mechanics!
I have a hard time understanding your excellent English sentences, but I think that relativity theory and quantum mechanics are incompatible theories!
Thank you!
You are correct. There are claims that String theory is able to link them, but I have no ability to confirm or deny that is true.
The driving force behind relativity and quantum mechanics was a belief that one should concentrate on the mathematics behind physics and not the popular explanations.
Not surprisingly, the popular explations that arise from both studies end up falling short. This is the nature of language and logic.
People who start a study of physics with the explanations of quantum mechanics will run into problems just as the people who started their study of physics with the idea that Newtonian Physics explained it all.
I found the explanation Nima gave about the Planck length being an insuperable barrier to precise factual understanding compelling. I wish I had a better grasp of how his positive geometric technique worked because it's so much less complex than calculus and his claims for it are encouraging.
Thanks!
Boy, I do basic science stuff with my kids and we probably will never look into anything of this magnitude. I'm glad you enjoy it though! :)
I was inspired to want to learn about science by reading science fiction pulp novels as a kid. You don't have to teach them physics at a college level to interest them in the way the universe actually is, and science is an excellent way to teach kids to question everything, because that's how science works. That's the scientific method in a nutshell: believe nothing you can disprove, and only suspect things you can't disprove might be true.