DarkRange55
Enlightened
- Oct 15, 2023
- 1,701
In many ways time is ambiguous. It would be tempting to think that time might be a kind of illusion. For example if you stop all motion and make everything completely static, time would appear to freeze and the configuration you've setup will appear eternal. Appear is the key word. But that's not actually the case because certain things like radioactive decay, quantum tunneling and other quantum world effects cannot be stopped, thus they would still mark the passage of time. Even the potential decay of the proton, if that occurs in the distant far future universe, will happen as a function of time. Time is indeed more than just a clock ticking. It is the governing factor of entropy, and it has certain strange aspects in that the rate at which it ticks changes with acceleration. So if you're in a starship traveling at great velocity, time dilates relative to the surroundings you're passing through. It would appear to be ticking normally to you, but ticking very slowly to the rest of the universe observing you. You also get this effect near a gravitational source because gravity also represents an acceleration. One towards the gravitational source. Time has always held the possibility or partial possibility of time travel. Traveling to the future is allowed. We're doing it right now with the passage of time. And you can alter the rate at which you move into the future with acceleration or gravity. As far as we can tell the universe forbids backwards time travel. The only way we can think of doing it is to build something that can go faster than light. This works across the board for any FTL hypothetical but also Relativity in that if you exceed the speed of light through acceleration, which there isn't any way to do AFAWK, time would move backwards.
This all comes together to pose an interesting question: is time a something or an illusion? But everything we know right now it appears to be a something. And so does space incidentally. The black emptiness of space itself also in some ways seems to behave in some respects like a physical something, but not an object, but not a nothing either. It stretches and expands and the two are linked somehow which is why Einstein and others termed the whole thing space-time. This has tempted some especially in string theory to see time as a dimension. As it stands right now our universe is sometimes described as four known dimensions. Three of space, one of time. And time does look like a dimension. We are after all moving through it and it even has a direction, forward. Also known as the arrow of time. Physicists have long grappled with why the arrow of time points forward. Nothing seems to stop it from pointing backward. But it just does what it does. But there is some evidence in recent work in quantum mechanics that suggest it may be a quantum effect and really does exist. This all however may be completely wrong and we've misinterpreted time all together.
New work has actually resurrected a form of a very old idea that had been abandoned in the 1980's. The idea is that time may not actually be a fundamental component of our physical reality as we know it in our relativistic universe of the large. But instead arises from a quantum effect. In short, this work sees time as emergent from quantum entanglement. With quantum entanglement you have two entangled particles that can be separated by any distance including clear across the observable universe. If one of those particles changes state, then the other instantly does as well. What links them or what they are linking through, perhaps an unknown dimension where particles are not physically separated is unknown. We just know the effect is real because we can entangle particles in the lab and watch it happen. As an aside we also know that what would be intuitively seen as a way to communicate doesn't actually let you do it in practice. It simply does not allow meaningful information to be transferred on a fundamental basis. Again the universe seems to prohibit this. The idea is this notion that when we see an object changing over time its because its entangled with some type of clock. This does not have to be a technological clock, just something functioning as one. If an observer were outside of that entangled system then nothing would appear to change. In other words, time in this sense just an effect of entanglement. In this paper's model, the clock is represented by a system of very small magnets entangled with a quantum oscillator. That kind of model is well understood in physics and serves as a possible real world way to eventually test this model. It turns out, this model is actually described by Schrodinger's equation, which is used to predict how quantum level particles behave, except they added another variable, which was time, that marks the quantum states of the magnets. They then repeated the whole thing but under the assumption that the magnets and oscillator are large enough essentially (or you could say non-quantum enough) to not have their behavior be governed by quantum effects. Sort of how our world works. The quantum effects become lost in the noise in the world of the big and we rarely see them. The first set of calculations set out how time would appear in the quantum world, whereas the second sets out to see how time would behave under the same regime but in the classical world of the big. It turns out that its the same thing. The resulting equations matched with the equations used to predict classical objects moving around. Yet its still being governed by quantum mechanics. This is important if it ends up being experimentally not just for explaining how time arises on all scales but a major quantum effect is also having an enormous effect on the universe.
But what effect does the quantum world have on time itself? The new work highlights something interesting. In general relativity, time is part and parcel with the universe, baked into it. It can twist and warp and dilate. Quantum theory does not see it like this, instead it sees it as something that is fixed and does not change like many properties of a quantum object can. So to measure time in the quantum world you have to have a clock external to the object you're observing.
The bottom line with all of this is that time is two different things in GR and quantum theory. A lot of physicists think that this is something that should not be ignored since its all the same universe. Whether it's a star or an electron. And that sometimes gets lost in translation between the two different understandings of the universe. We know that there is a missing puzzle piece linking both highly successful theories. We just haven't found it yet. And it's possible that it is the key to understanding time.
This all comes together to pose an interesting question: is time a something or an illusion? But everything we know right now it appears to be a something. And so does space incidentally. The black emptiness of space itself also in some ways seems to behave in some respects like a physical something, but not an object, but not a nothing either. It stretches and expands and the two are linked somehow which is why Einstein and others termed the whole thing space-time. This has tempted some especially in string theory to see time as a dimension. As it stands right now our universe is sometimes described as four known dimensions. Three of space, one of time. And time does look like a dimension. We are after all moving through it and it even has a direction, forward. Also known as the arrow of time. Physicists have long grappled with why the arrow of time points forward. Nothing seems to stop it from pointing backward. But it just does what it does. But there is some evidence in recent work in quantum mechanics that suggest it may be a quantum effect and really does exist. This all however may be completely wrong and we've misinterpreted time all together.
New work has actually resurrected a form of a very old idea that had been abandoned in the 1980's. The idea is that time may not actually be a fundamental component of our physical reality as we know it in our relativistic universe of the large. But instead arises from a quantum effect. In short, this work sees time as emergent from quantum entanglement. With quantum entanglement you have two entangled particles that can be separated by any distance including clear across the observable universe. If one of those particles changes state, then the other instantly does as well. What links them or what they are linking through, perhaps an unknown dimension where particles are not physically separated is unknown. We just know the effect is real because we can entangle particles in the lab and watch it happen. As an aside we also know that what would be intuitively seen as a way to communicate doesn't actually let you do it in practice. It simply does not allow meaningful information to be transferred on a fundamental basis. Again the universe seems to prohibit this. The idea is this notion that when we see an object changing over time its because its entangled with some type of clock. This does not have to be a technological clock, just something functioning as one. If an observer were outside of that entangled system then nothing would appear to change. In other words, time in this sense just an effect of entanglement. In this paper's model, the clock is represented by a system of very small magnets entangled with a quantum oscillator. That kind of model is well understood in physics and serves as a possible real world way to eventually test this model. It turns out, this model is actually described by Schrodinger's equation, which is used to predict how quantum level particles behave, except they added another variable, which was time, that marks the quantum states of the magnets. They then repeated the whole thing but under the assumption that the magnets and oscillator are large enough essentially (or you could say non-quantum enough) to not have their behavior be governed by quantum effects. Sort of how our world works. The quantum effects become lost in the noise in the world of the big and we rarely see them. The first set of calculations set out how time would appear in the quantum world, whereas the second sets out to see how time would behave under the same regime but in the classical world of the big. It turns out that its the same thing. The resulting equations matched with the equations used to predict classical objects moving around. Yet its still being governed by quantum mechanics. This is important if it ends up being experimentally not just for explaining how time arises on all scales but a major quantum effect is also having an enormous effect on the universe.
But what effect does the quantum world have on time itself? The new work highlights something interesting. In general relativity, time is part and parcel with the universe, baked into it. It can twist and warp and dilate. Quantum theory does not see it like this, instead it sees it as something that is fixed and does not change like many properties of a quantum object can. So to measure time in the quantum world you have to have a clock external to the object you're observing.
The bottom line with all of this is that time is two different things in GR and quantum theory. A lot of physicists think that this is something that should not be ignored since its all the same universe. Whether it's a star or an electron. And that sometimes gets lost in translation between the two different understandings of the universe. We know that there is a missing puzzle piece linking both highly successful theories. We just haven't found it yet. And it's possible that it is the key to understanding time.
