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One-Electron Universe
- edgyquant 13d agoI always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?
- amelius 13d agoThis theory adds more complications than it creates simplifications.
- fnordpiglet 13d agoI’d note that occams razor is a probabilistic statement and not a law.
- amelius 13d agoBut who is applying it?
- fnordpiglet 13d agoComplications vs simplifications was a restatement of Occam’s razor as you assuredly know and knew. However complications added can be doors to other hidden processes that are simply poorly understood or observe. The increase in complications isn’t necessarily a pure gradient, it can indicate where more interesting questions lie. In this specific case experimental evidence shows it’s almost certainly not true. It was less the complications that killed it than objective observation.
- staplung 13d ago“One electron ought to be enough for everyone.”
- DonHopkins 13d ago[dead]
- grougnax 13d ago[dead]
- netbioserror 13d agoThen wouldn't it be "one-photon"? I've heard (but don't fully understand) that massed particles are simply photons trapped in toroidal vortices, which gives them an outward charge field and lets them interact with the Higgs. Annihilation supposedly just being untangling the toroid.
- pixl97 13d agoPretty sure that electrons are a fundamental particle coming from the electron field. They are pointlike objects with no other components.
- netbioserror 13d agoIf mass is proportionally equivalent to energy, then this can't be true. The photon is the fundamental energy unit. Right?
- pixl97 13d agoPhotons are the force carrier for the EM field, they are not electrons themselves. Edit: look up a chart for the standard model of particle physics.
- abeppu 13d agoEven if there were as many positrons as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab spontaneously condense into a very low entropy concentrated configuration?
- noncovalence 13d ago_We_ are still traveling forwards in time. If you followed a cloud of antiparticles backwards in time along its direction of travel, then you would see entropy decrease yes, though regular particles would do the same if we followed them back in time.
- fnordpiglet 13d agoThe answer is that they don’t literally go backwards in time showing reverse causality. They are representable in QFT by reversing the time component of their counterpart, which doesn’t impact how they interact with broader causality, just their internal configuration. Further - this does not play out in the lab as reversed causality even between anti particles. You can collide two positrons then detect them later at their destinations just fine in normal causality. It’s a shame because it would be really sweet to find some reversal of entropy and causality somewhere or somehow!
- Pet_Ant 13d agoMay I introduce you to Maxwell’s Demon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon
- DonHopkins 13d agoI'm too low energy to click on that link.
- fnordpiglet 13d agoYou may, but if you read the link, you’ll find it consistent with the second law of thermodynamics despite being clever about it. The demonstration of consistency requires a modern understanding of information theory, but it’s been long realized it’s likely not a real “out.”
- diablomablo 13d agoMy thought is that if there's only one electron, then its probabilistic location at a place and a time, should be impacted by its own energy across all places and times. That quantum gravity comes from generalizing the Schrodinger's equation to include these energies in the phase of the wave function, causing the phase to skew and the probability to update towards the location of large mass/energies.
- szundi 13d ago[dead]
- lolakutty 13d agoSpace and time are illusions. So probably true in some sense...There is probably no electron at all...I mean, one would be quite arbitrary, why not two?
- gizajob 13d agoWhere is the machine you used to type out this comment, and when did you type it?
- lolakutty 13d agoPut on a VR headset and tell me where the buttons you see are? Space is felt and so is time. Both are sensations that consciousness feels.
- throwaway27448 13d agoHuman language is poorly-suited for describing a coherent universe because you can construct all sorts of incoherent propositions (e.g. "what existed before time"/"what exists outside of reality" etc etc); philosophies/faiths have struggled with this for millennia. It is good enough to get laid, though.
- lolakutty 12d agoYea, we use language to think, and this limitation hinders with the forming of such thoughts....
- stared 13d agoIn the line, I recommend „The Egg” by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
- amelius 13d agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI (animated version)
- itsalwaysgood 13d agoThat's such a great read. Asimov's 'The Last Question' is another good one that's in line: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
- sph 13d agoI love both of these, and I wonder why would I need mainstream religion when stories like these are deep enough to provide answers, hope and meaning for those who seek it. If the message resonates with you, why not adopt it? Nobody could ever prove they’re just fantasy. Sorry for the digression, I’m just an atheist with a love for philosophy and spirituality.
- AnimalMuppet 13d agoIf you're going to be content with "nobody could ever prove it wrong", what do you have against mainstream religion? Fantasy is fantasy. Either it's true to what's really there, or it isn't.
- Tadpole9181 12d agoUnlike the other religions, "The Egg" doesn't impose morals or pretend to be an infallible historical record, prophet of things to come, or explainer of the universe. It's just a cute philosophical story that exists entirely within the imagination to make us feel better and less lost. That is to say, it just lacks the same "baggage" of the others.
- mvlipwig 13d agoThis might be a result of me not understanding theoretical physics, but this seems "not even wrong." How could you even go about testing this?
- zmgsabst 13d agoWe have something like a spinor network in 4D space, where some portions are opposite others in parameters. Is this a diagram of particles interacting or a single thread weaving through time? Pick your metaphor.
- sigmoid10 13d agoThis is yet another case where a layman-written wiki article about physics is highly confusing to other laypeople, because it only tells you half the story. Particularly because it seems to be based on a chapter of Feynman's popular science book. But the book actually goes on and points out how Feynman immediately dismissed Wheeler's hypothesis, because the universe contains a lot more electrons than positrons. You'd have to explain that imbalance first if you want to entertain this line of thought.
- torginus 13d agoAs a layperson myself - how can we tell that a distant celestial object is not made from antimatter? Afaik, it doesn't behave differently from matter, other than it annihilates on contact. Also even if we could, that would only describe the practically and theoretically observable universe, which doesn't rule out other places looking very different (on its own)
- pixl97 13d agoBecause distant celestial objects accelerate a lot of matter away from them as parts of different processes. For example if there were a sizeable chunk of space were antimatter than at the edge of this space there would be a constant glow of annihilation. We don't see that anywhere (well except things like quasars doing this at small scales. So, yea, it would have to be outside the observable universe in which that means we can do no empirical science on it therefore it not being real to us.
- api 13d agoAnother interesting one is the black hole electron: the electron as a stable micro black hole, possibly super-extremal. Probably not, but apparently some of the math does work. There's been some attempts to model all particles as micro black holes or stable quantum scale gravitational objects of some kind.
- pixl97 13d agoBlack hole, or singularity? Black hole describes the event horizon and singularity describes the point like object that would exist in a non-rotating black hole.
- chasil 13d agoCP-violation would appear to rule this out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation The main referenced wiki suggests that the missing positrons are inside protons, but recent a recent LHC experiment asserts CP-violation over baryons.
- doctorzook 13d agoWouldn’t this be a CPT exchange, though?
- Svoka 13d agoWhole idea is from 40s and nonsensical with modern understanding of quantum fields.
- ck2 13d agoit's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idea right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser) but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk
- lioeters 13d agoA twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe. It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
- gizajob 13d agoI think some branches of Buddhism derived this too.
- notduncansmith 13d agoYep you can take this one pretty far
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- itsalwaysgood 13d agoIt's easy to imagine making all the exact same decisions as someone else, if you were born into their body and lived their experiences. A decision is a reaction from an observer: and it requires information and feedback. Is the thing that decides special? Is it the same thing as everyone else's? If you can imagine it, does it make it more likely? Only time tells.
- thesmtsolver2 13d agoOriginally derived from Hinduism thousands of years before Buddha (see Advaita for a modern view and Upanishads or Gita/Vedas for source) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman
- r3trohack3r 13d agoChristianity (Catholicism) derived this as well. John Scotus Eriugena in the 800s. Apocatastasis The thesis goes something like: God is timeless. Time is necessary for change. In order to experience change, God creates universes that have time and descends into these lower states of existence. This gives rise to conscious beings - they’re literally small disconnected slices of God that descended to our state of existence. When you die, you “roll up” back into God taking your lived experience with you. He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned.
- krylon 13d agoGotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).
- tomasphan 13d agoHow does this work with QFT? If an electron is just an excitation in a field then it being “one electron” is meaningless.
- saulpw 13d agoYeah an electron is not a 'thing'. It's like saying there's only one wave in the ocean.
- Obscurity4340 13d agoThis could practically be a zen koan
- Svoka 13d agoIt doesn't. It is theory for times proceeding QFT or modern quantum mechanics and nonsensical in its context. It is like saying that meter is same everywhere. Electron is a quantized energy level of electron field, a measurement.
- gradus_ad 13d agoIt may not be one electron but it is one field.
- rf15 13d agoI guess it's the age old question of what's a true, distinct particle/thing and what's just the disturbance of a vaster medium (wave)?
- throwaway27448 13d agoHow meaningful is this actually? Is this a measurable distinction, or a conceptual one with the same semantics?
- dualvariable 13d agoIsn't this proven incorrect by CP-violating processes that also violate T-symmetry (preserving CPT)?