I have decided to focus my Amateur Physics Speculations on the one thing that bugs me the most. The Measurement Problem. I'm choosing the phrase this as The Moon Is There so I do not have to engage theological speculation about G_d (whether they play dice or not, and actually I'd assume they did) and focus directly on the issue of subjectivity/objectivity which I think is the actual nexus of this problem.
It seems that whenever I've listened to a theoretical physicist long enough (albeit a small sample) they confess to me that they do not actually believe The Copenhagen Interpretation. Physics students must learn this as it's a key part of one of our best and most important theories. But it's clearly nonsense, no matter how you want to put it (using G_d or not). So each theoretical physicist who even takes such things seriously has devised one or another ways around the Measurement Problem. Typically nowadays this involves attempting to describe the dynamics of wave function collapse, as if other than measurement may be involved, therefore moving the scene from the subjective to the objective.
The point here is to make suggestions, most of which may well be faulty. As a crackpot conspiracy theorist, it is easy for me to produce "theories" to explain nearly anything. Often contradictory with each other and themselves, but sometimes possibly not. I'm hoping this "skill" might be just the thing to help solve this problem.
The Universe Has Less Information Than It Would Seem
I already posted this basic idea, and it still looks good to me. One way or another, Quantum Theory is incomplete. But the obvious way it could be incomplete--that there are additional hidden variable(s)--has been shown to be false by the experimental research testing the Bell-type inequalities. But it looks to me like there's a way out of this conundrum, and that is if instead of additional local information there is actually less global information than would at first appear. It is as if some previous world had been subjected to lossy compression to produce the present one. What this would mean is that things are more correlated than we would expect.
One way to imagine this would as if the 3 dimensions of space were actually 2 dimensions, but somehow we see them projected as 3 dimensions. Equivalently, the 4 dimensions of Spacetime were actually 3 dimensions. Or maybe 3.5 dimensions ?
As weird as this might be, it's still not as weird as the Copenhagen Interpretation.
The Wave Function (and Entanglement) Isn't a Thing
Even among actual theoretical physicists who know a lot more than me, there is debate as to whether the entire universe is entangled. This may follow from the Big Bang. But if the entire universe is entangled, then surely the wave function has collapsed too, and these very notions are rendered very differently (and you could say, following Wittgenstein, into uselessness).
But I arrived at the idea differently. I imagined very advanced aliens who are very tiny, fast, and invisible. And they fiddle inside our entanglement experiments. They could have produced what we consider the primary particles of an interaction, entangled them, and measured one of the entangled pair before the particle even begins to collide in our experiment. So they already know what it is, even if we don't. In fact, the wave function (if it were something real) has already collapsed. We just don't know about it yet, and carry on as if it hadn't, and for us it behaves as if it hadn't. For them, it has, and they interpret those experiments differently.
And so, by these arguments and others, it seems to me that neither The Wave Function nor Entanglement is a Thing. The universe is made of Spacetime and Energy, not Probabilities. Our best understanding of the universe may be necessarily in the form of functions of probabilities, but not the universe itself. Likewise our assertions of entanglement relate to those things we know to be entangled but someone else may see many other things as being entangled too, it's determined by what different observers know about the universe.
But what also shows up here, in the sense of many more things being correlated than we know about, is another way the universe contains less information than at first it appears. Things seemingly independent are actually correlated, that means there is less actual information, again.
Faulty Instruments
One way to imagine the 3 or 3.5 dimensional compression of Spacetime is this. Suppose you are setting up to do a Bell Type experiment. But your cross-eyed machinist has built the arm for the Q detector in the wrong plane, so it describes the angle incorrectly. This could explain getting measurements that deviate from those predicted for hidden variables.
OK, so your machinist is better than that. But suppose that unbeknownst to your machinist, the Z dimension is continuously expanding with time. So then even if the apparatus is built correctly in static time, it is wrong for any event which takes time to complete.
Living in the present always, as is our nature, we don't observe any changes in spatial dimensions. Everything we know is locked into place by electromagnetic, strong, and weak interactions. But the particles we measure are not so locked into place. They cannot be. So in their terms, we measure them wrongly.
Spacetime may be not so much "expanding" as the past is "compressing." Perhaps it's even lossy compression of the kind in which actual dimensions are converted to a mere ordering. That could produce the sort of fractional dimension I am suggesting.
Spacetime and Things In Spacetime
Another possible redundancy in the universe is the partitioning of massy objects and spacetime itself. Hmmn, maybe not. As far as we know, spacetime isn't so partitioned, though it appears that way to us. Massy objects simply have fields which appear to give them the expanse we experience.
When Time Advances, there is More Information. Therefore there was less information in the Past than the Present. This means there must be a limit to resolution...so that new information is created with each event...that could not have been fully predicted. It is Spacetime itself which has Free Will. And as it creates new information, it expands, so the past was smaller too. Spacetime propagates its decisions through it's light cone within which every particle can move.
No comments:
Post a Comment