9 ms·

One-electron universe

128 points by _pius 12y ago

olla 12y ago
Every time some limit is reached in a physics equation, dilation, contraction or even moving in time is taken as a measure to rescue. It all sounds like a convenient method for explaining something we can not explain. It all comes from the fact that time is defined through speed and speed depends on space, thus time cannot describe dimensions not dependant of space.
- one-more-minute 12y ago
  In what sense is time defined by speed? Surely it's the other way around? Currently the second is defined by a number of oscillations of a known wavelength of radiation, which explicitly avoids any dependence on space / measurement of spatial speed.
  - olla 12y ago
    Isn't wavelength as such dependant on space? It all seems to come together as A is defined by B and B is defined by A.
    - one-more-minute 12y ago
      Yes, but the standard second doesn't depend on wavelength (maybe I should have said "known energy"). You take a Caesium-133 atom, look at it's emission spectrum, isolate the ground state radiation and time a number of oscillations. Of course, the radiation has a specific wavelength/energy, but the calculation doesn't depend on it. Once you know about time, you can start talking about distance – a meter is defined as the distance light travels in a given time. Given that the meter is defined this way, defining time in terms of speed would be a bit circular.
      - olla 12y ago
        Ok, the time dilation makes actually sense now. So like chemical reactions depend on temperature and pressure, physical reactions (if they can be called this way) are dependant on gravity and velocity (dependance on the last I can not quite get still). By physical reactions I mean the transitions between the ground states that time is defined by.
        one-more-minute 12y ago
        Sure, local velocity at any rate. If someone goes past you in a rocket, you'll notice that their Caesium radiation is oscillating slower than yours, so their second will appear to take longer than yours.
- snarfy 12y ago
  I believe you are referring to velocity = distance/time. This is the non-relativistic view of velocity. It makes more sense when you define what distance is. When you push something with your finger and move it, you do not change it's velocity. You change it's acceleration. It's a small but important distinction. Under relativity, the distance between two points in spacetime is defined by the minkowski metric: d = sqrt( x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - (ct)^2 ) Notice time is negative/imaginary. The tl;dr of this is that an object at rest is still has a velocity along the time plane at the speed c, and any non rest velocity is relative to that (which affects d), which is where length contraction comes from. You're right in you can't define one without the other, so it's redefined around the constant c and the minkowski metric. It's why they call it spacetime.
fibo 12y ago
I also arrived at the same conclusion during meditation
- icebraining 12y ago
  groovy, man!
tempestn 12y ago
I'm with Feynman. One electron sounds like nonsense. (Where exactly does the "looping around" happen, where it changes directions? Outside of time?) However, the idea of positrons as electrons moving backward in time is cool, and does seem like a convenient sort of an explanation for their creation and annihilation.
- one-more-minute 12y ago
  The idea is that any time an electron-positron pair is created or destroyed is a change in direction. Say a pair is created in space, they move around for five seconds, and annihilate each other. You could also explain that as a single electron in a loop – electron moves forwards in time for five seconds, changes direction (becomes a positron), moves back in time for five seconds, changes direction, the cycle repeats. You can extend that to a set of two of electrons/positron pairs. Assuming each electron is created and destroyed with different positrons, you can again explain the system in terms of a single electron that changes direction four times. Add a few more in and you have a whole universe with one electron. (That assumption may be a big one, which is where things fall down, but it's not nonsense. Also, bear in mind that the while idea of "moving" back in time is a helpful analogy, it's not very precise and shouldn't be taken too literally)
  - jarin 12y ago
    Going a little further with the thought (and I am definitely not a physicist), what if that electron "loop" (or even the "single electron") is itself moving within the four-dimensional space. Could that explain the particle wave function? Meaning a particle's location is expressed as a probability because its location really is random-ish (i.e. the loop is moving around) until it's "locked in" within our subjective "arrow of time" frame of reference by a particle interacting with it. P.S. I acknowledge that I have absolutely no real-world basis for this idea, just a thought.
  - tempestn 12y ago
    Of course, yes. Thank you. For some reason my mental picture was limited to creation and annihilation events being the exception, with most particles existing 'throughout time', but that's what's nonsense. In fact, if you consider that a lot of particles would have presumably been created in the big bang, at which point they would conveniently be in the same location in our other three dimensions as well, it's certainly conceivable that you could have a single particle pinballing back and forth as you (and I guess Wheeler) describe. Of course, still far from a certainty, but a neat idea.
resyum 12y ago
I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!"
V-2 12y ago
Let's hope nothing bad happens to that electron, then.
- stesch 12y ago
  Are you blackmailing the universe?
- foobar2020 12y ago
  Relax, it's probably God's favourite way of keeping an eye on his universe.
pmontra 12y ago
I remember I already heard that, but is there a way to proof it? Annihilating electrons with positions obviously isn't enough.
- foobar2020 12y ago
  Well I suppose there is a way to disprove this: create an electron-positron pair, then annihilate the pair. This way we would get a closed loop, which would obviously not be a part of a giant knot spanning through the universe.
  - raldi 12y ago
    Measure their mass first, too. If they don't match the mass of the ones that are part of the knot, then you know you've stumbled onto something big.
  - drostie 12y ago
    It's not "obvious" though: there is no proof that your electron didn't (via tunneling) exit whatever trap you put it in only to get replaced by some other electron from the environment which jumped in a short moment after (also via tunneling). The best you could say is "it's highly probable that at least at one time it was at least a two-electron universe."
quarterto 12y ago
One-electron seems very problematic in light of the observed antimatter asymmetry. Why/how could the electron travel forwards in time more often than backwards?
- yk 12y ago
  Well, assume that time loops back onto itself. Then the electron goes forward most of the time and you see multiple copies. ( This is of course ridiculous, everybody knows that all electrons are just pointers to one const particle structure. )
  - V-2 12y ago
    Obtaining multiple electrons by forcing a single one to bounce back and forth all the way across the time line a zillion times seems like a major design smell. That would be the worst hack ever, or at least the worst one before Facebook devs hacked Dalvik just to get their app to run on Android: http://jaxenter.com/facebooks-completely-insane-dalvik-hack-105776.html http://jaxenter.com/facebooks-completely-insane-dalvik-hack-... ;) Perhaps our universe is one created by a junior, or an intern, and this "creative" workaround got mocked on TheDailyWTF somewhere.
    - palmer_eldritch 12y ago
      I bet those who have to maintain it aren't laughing. And you don't need to be a junior or an intern to come up with an insanely bad design.
      - V-2 12y ago
        you don't need to be a junior or an intern to come up with an insanely bad design That's true, unfortunately - although lack of hands-on experience helps
    - Lexarius 12y ago
      It would be terrible to design it that way, but I think it's fine as a compiler optimization. Most of that datastructure is constant anyway, think of the memory savings!
gesman 12y ago
Different sources are saying the same: http://www.youaretrulyloved.com/bashar-explains-how-everything-is-the-one-same-thing/ http://www.youaretrulyloved.com/bashar-explains-how-everythi...
theon144 12y ago
>"the eventual creation and annihilation of pairs that may occur now and then is no creation or annihilation, but only a change of direction of moving particles, from past to future, or from future to past." Forgive my ignorance, but how does the fact that annihilation "produces" energy out of the two particles fit into this?
- one-more-minute 12y ago
  Since a photon is its own antiparticle, you might imagine that a photon and an electron "bounce" off of each other in time, and both reverse their directions. From our point of view it looks like two photons created and two electrons annihilated, or vice versa. Interesting idea at any rate.
  - sukilot 12y ago
    One electron and one positron, not two electrons.
- ThrustVectoring 12y ago
  Mostly a guess: the energy produced by annihilation is the energy required to reverse the direction of the electron. Similarly, the energy require to create a pair is the same quantity.
skywhopper 12y ago
I love the direct quote: "I did not take the idea that all the electrons were the same one from [Wheeler] as seriously as I took the observation that positrons could simply be represented as electrons going from the future to the past in a back section of their world lines. That, I stole!" I can absolutely hear it in Feynman's rapid, wry, dramatic voice.
- drostie 12y ago
  You can read his whole Nobel speech online and it's well worth a read. My favorite part is: "There was a gentleman, newly arrived from Europe (Herbert Jehle) who came and sat next to me. Europeans are much more serious than we are in America because they think that a good place to discuss intellectual matters is a beer party. So, he sat by me and asked, "what are you doing?" and I said, "I'm drinking beer!" Then I realized that he wanted to know what work I was doing..." link: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/196...
nilkn 12y ago
> Any given moment in time is represented by a slice across spacetime Is this actually true when we take into account special relativity? I've always struggled with this. I was taught that this sort of thing is not nearly so simple. For instance, if you fix a point in spacetime and have a timelike vector, representing the motion of an observer, then the set of events which that observer will perceive as simultaneous to the fixed point all lie in the plane orthogonal to that timelike vector. Even more bizarrely, because this is a non-Euclidean notion of orthogonal, this orthogonal complement rotates towards the vector as it deviates from the centerline of the future line cone at that point. Given all this, I don't see how one can just say that a slice across spacetime somehow represents a particular moment in time. I thought the whole point of relativity is that there are no absolute time slices in spacetime.
- drostie 12y ago
  Yes, it's still true when we take special relativity into account. One good perspective on special relativity is that it sort of says, "everybody's right." That is, you abstract your "present" moment to distant positions as a 3d plane in the 4d space; someone else at the same position with a different velocity will have their present too, and those will not be 100% commensurate, but that's OK -- both of you have valid coordinate systems for any calculations you want to accomplish. The family of all the "presents" of a point in spacetime is the set of all points which are spacelike-separated from that point -- i.e. if that point is at the origin of some coordinate system, the complete "relativistic present" is all of those points such that c² t² − x² − y² − z² < 0 Every observer passing through a point agrees upon these points exactly; the only difference is that my t=0 will not correspond to t' = 0 under a Lorentz transform, so that my "simultaneous" at space-separated points is not someone else's "simultaneous" at those points. (Light bubble picture: imagine that the light which shines upon an event in spacetime expands outwards with speed c, forming an expanding bubble of light. Consider two events. They are both "simultaneous" in the sense that there is an observer who thinks that they are simultaneous, if their light bubbles start out topologically disconnected and overlap eventually. They are both "time-ordered" in the other case, if one bubble is inside the other. If two things are objectively time-ordered then they are not objectively space-separated, because the points in the larger bubble correspond to valid inertial trajectories of a spaceship going less than the speed of light -- there are some spaceships which visited both events inertially. Similarly if two things are objectively space-separated then they are not objectively time-ordered; consider someone on the intersection of the two light bubbles seeing both events happen "right now"; there is always a velocity vector such that they will trace the distances back to the origins of the events as equal -- and hence that observer thinks that both happened simultaneously at their different locations.)
chriswarbo 12y ago
There's a related idea called the "transactional interpretation" of quantum mechanics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation The idea is that every event (eg. a particle collision) sends waves forwards and backwards in time, eg. if * is an event and </> are waves moving backwards/forwards in time: <- past future -> <<<<<<<<<*>>>>>>>>> The waves from multiple events can overlap and interfere, eg. <<<<<<<<<<<<*>>>>> <<<*>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The interference depends on the phase of the waves, but let's simplify and say that similar arrows are destructive (represented as a space) and opposite arrows are constructive (represented as a dash). In which case, the interference pattern of the example above would be: *--------* It looks like there is something which is created at the first event, travels through time to the second event, and is then destroyed. That "thing" is what we'd call a particle. This idea is called "transactional" because it treats the existence of a particle as not just depending on the event which creates it, but also on the event which eventually destroys it, and the interference of these "waves through time" is like a 'negotiation' between the two events.
- drostie 12y ago
  It'd be interesting to know how they deal with the phase requirements--normally you have boundary conditions which set up these sorts of standing waves but it sounds like these "events" would not have that and thus would have to conspire their phases so that you wouldn't get something more like: ---* *--- Probably it's something like, "each event must exist on at least two different fields; if you look at the other (~) field too then this event looks like ---*~~~~~~~~*--- so that, for example, this electron clearly collided with a high-energy photon to become a muon for a time and then relaxed back to being an electron, emitting the photon back."
- loceng 12y ago
  Appreciate your explanation - thanks.
scotty79 12y ago
It's really neat that electrons and positrons traveling in time just bounce of photons, that are timeless (because of the speed they have). I wonder what cool observation might make by similarly rotating they intuition 90 degrees so that time becomes axis something can move on.
krylon 12y ago
Not being a physicist (not even close), I find it amazing how within just ~100 years, "our" model of the universe has changed so drastically. I once read that sometime in the late 1800s, people assumed that they had basically understood how the universe works, and that all that was left was to fill in some of the blanks. And now look what an increasingly strange (and wonderful!) place we find ourselves in.

128 points by _pius 12y ago

olla 12y ago

Every time some limit is reached in a physics equation, dilation, contraction or even moving in time is taken as a measure to rescue. It all sounds like a convenient method for explaining something we can not explain. It all comes from the fact that time is defined through speed and speed depends on space, thus time cannot describe dimensions not dependant of space.

one-more-minute 12y ago
In what sense is time defined by speed? Surely it's the other way around? Currently the second is defined by a number of oscillations of a known wavelength of radiation, which explicitly avoids any dependence on space / measurement of spatial speed.
- olla 12y ago
  Isn't wavelength as such dependant on space? It all seems to come together as A is defined by B and B is defined by A.
  - one-more-minute 12y ago
    Yes, but the standard second doesn't depend on wavelength (maybe I should have said "known energy"). You take a Caesium-133 atom, look at it's emission spectrum, isolate the ground state radiation and time a number of oscillations. Of course, the radiation has a specific wavelength/energy, but the calculation doesn't depend on it. Once you know about time, you can start talking about distance – a meter is defined as the distance light travels in a given time. Given that the meter is defined this way, defining time in terms of speed would be a bit circular.
    - olla 12y ago
      Ok, the time dilation makes actually sense now. So like chemical reactions depend on temperature and pressure, physical reactions (if they can be called this way) are dependant on gravity and velocity (dependance on the last I can not quite get still). By physical reactions I mean the transitions between the ground states that time is defined by.
      - one-more-minute 12y ago
        Sure, local velocity at any rate. If someone goes past you in a rocket, you'll notice that their Caesium radiation is oscillating slower than yours, so their second will appear to take longer than yours.
snarfy 12y ago
I believe you are referring to velocity = distance/time. This is the non-relativistic view of velocity. It makes more sense when you define what distance is. When you push something with your finger and move it, you do not change it's velocity. You change it's acceleration. It's a small but important distinction. Under relativity, the distance between two points in spacetime is defined by the minkowski metric: d = sqrt( x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - (ct)^2 ) Notice time is negative/imaginary. The tl;dr of this is that an object at rest is still has a velocity along the time plane at the speed c, and any non rest velocity is relative to that (which affects d), which is where length contraction comes from. You're right in you can't define one without the other, so it's redefined around the constant c and the minkowski metric. It's why they call it spacetime.

fibo 12y ago

I also arrived at the same conclusion during meditation

icebraining 12y ago
groovy, man!

tempestn 12y ago

I'm with Feynman. One electron sounds like nonsense. (Where exactly does the "looping around" happen, where it changes directions? Outside of time?) However, the idea of positrons as electrons moving backward in time is cool, and does seem like a convenient sort of an explanation for their creation and annihilation.

one-more-minute 12y ago
The idea is that any time an electron-positron pair is created or destroyed is a change in direction. Say a pair is created in space, they move around for five seconds, and annihilate each other. You could also explain that as a single electron in a loop – electron moves forwards in time for five seconds, changes direction (becomes a positron), moves back in time for five seconds, changes direction, the cycle repeats. You can extend that to a set of two of electrons/positron pairs. Assuming each electron is created and destroyed with different positrons, you can again explain the system in terms of a single electron that changes direction four times. Add a few more in and you have a whole universe with one electron. (That assumption may be a big one, which is where things fall down, but it's not nonsense. Also, bear in mind that the while idea of "moving" back in time is a helpful analogy, it's not very precise and shouldn't be taken too literally)
- jarin 12y ago
  Going a little further with the thought (and I am definitely not a physicist), what if that electron "loop" (or even the "single electron") is itself moving within the four-dimensional space. Could that explain the particle wave function? Meaning a particle's location is expressed as a probability because its location really is random-ish (i.e. the loop is moving around) until it's "locked in" within our subjective "arrow of time" frame of reference by a particle interacting with it. P.S. I acknowledge that I have absolutely no real-world basis for this idea, just a thought.
- tempestn 12y ago
  Of course, yes. Thank you. For some reason my mental picture was limited to creation and annihilation events being the exception, with most particles existing 'throughout time', but that's what's nonsense. In fact, if you consider that a lot of particles would have presumably been created in the big bang, at which point they would conveniently be in the same location in our other three dimensions as well, it's certainly conceivable that you could have a single particle pinballing back and forth as you (and I guess Wheeler) describe. Of course, still far from a certainty, but a neat idea.

resyum 12y ago

I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!"

V-2 12y ago

Let's hope nothing bad happens to that electron, then.

stesch 12y ago
Are you blackmailing the universe?
foobar2020 12y ago
Relax, it's probably God's favourite way of keeping an eye on his universe.

pmontra 12y ago

I remember I already heard that, but is there a way to proof it? Annihilating electrons with positions obviously isn't enough.

foobar2020 12y ago
Well I suppose there is a way to disprove this: create an electron-positron pair, then annihilate the pair. This way we would get a closed loop, which would obviously not be a part of a giant knot spanning through the universe.
- raldi 12y ago
  Measure their mass first, too. If they don't match the mass of the ones that are part of the knot, then you know you've stumbled onto something big.
- drostie 12y ago
  It's not "obvious" though: there is no proof that your electron didn't (via tunneling) exit whatever trap you put it in only to get replaced by some other electron from the environment which jumped in a short moment after (also via tunneling). The best you could say is "it's highly probable that at least at one time it was at least a two-electron universe."

quarterto 12y ago

One-electron seems very problematic in light of the observed antimatter asymmetry. Why/how could the electron travel forwards in time more often than backwards?

yk 12y ago
Well, assume that time loops back onto itself. Then the electron goes forward most of the time and you see multiple copies. ( This is of course ridiculous, everybody knows that all electrons are just pointers to one const particle structure. )
- V-2 12y ago
  Obtaining multiple electrons by forcing a single one to bounce back and forth all the way across the time line a zillion times seems like a major design smell. That would be the worst hack ever, or at least the worst one before Facebook devs hacked Dalvik just to get their app to run on Android: http://jaxenter.com/facebooks-completely-insane-dalvik-hack-105776.html http://jaxenter.com/facebooks-completely-insane-dalvik-hack-... ;) Perhaps our universe is one created by a junior, or an intern, and this "creative" workaround got mocked on TheDailyWTF somewhere.
  - palmer_eldritch 12y ago
    I bet those who have to maintain it aren't laughing. And you don't need to be a junior or an intern to come up with an insanely bad design.
    - V-2 12y ago
      you don't need to be a junior or an intern to come up with an insanely bad design That's true, unfortunately - although lack of hands-on experience helps
  - Lexarius 12y ago
    It would be terrible to design it that way, but I think it's fine as a compiler optimization. Most of that datastructure is constant anyway, think of the memory savings!

gesman 12y ago

Different sources are saying the same: http://www.youaretrulyloved.com/bashar-explains-how-everything-is-the-one-same-thing/ http://www.youaretrulyloved.com/bashar-explains-how-everythi...

theon144 12y ago

>"the eventual creation and annihilation of pairs that may occur now and then is no creation or annihilation, but only a change of direction of moving particles, from past to future, or from future to past." Forgive my ignorance, but how does the fact that annihilation "produces" energy out of the two particles fit into this?

one-more-minute 12y ago
Since a photon is its own antiparticle, you might imagine that a photon and an electron "bounce" off of each other in time, and both reverse their directions. From our point of view it looks like two photons created and two electrons annihilated, or vice versa. Interesting idea at any rate.
- sukilot 12y ago
  One electron and one positron, not two electrons.
ThrustVectoring 12y ago
Mostly a guess: the energy produced by annihilation is the energy required to reverse the direction of the electron. Similarly, the energy require to create a pair is the same quantity.

skywhopper 12y ago

I love the direct quote: "I did not take the idea that all the electrons were the same one from [Wheeler] as seriously as I took the observation that positrons could simply be represented as electrons going from the future to the past in a back section of their world lines. That, I stole!" I can absolutely hear it in Feynman's rapid, wry, dramatic voice.

drostie 12y ago
You can read his whole Nobel speech online and it's well worth a read. My favorite part is: "There was a gentleman, newly arrived from Europe (Herbert Jehle) who came and sat next to me. Europeans are much more serious than we are in America because they think that a good place to discuss intellectual matters is a beer party. So, he sat by me and asked, "what are you doing?" and I said, "I'm drinking beer!" Then I realized that he wanted to know what work I was doing..." link: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/196...

nilkn 12y ago

> Any given moment in time is represented by a slice across spacetime Is this actually true when we take into account special relativity? I've always struggled with this. I was taught that this sort of thing is not nearly so simple. For instance, if you fix a point in spacetime and have a timelike vector, representing the motion of an observer, then the set of events which that observer will perceive as simultaneous to the fixed point all lie in the plane orthogonal to that timelike vector. Even more bizarrely, because this is a non-Euclidean notion of orthogonal, this orthogonal complement rotates towards the vector as it deviates from the centerline of the future line cone at that point. Given all this, I don't see how one can just say that a slice across spacetime somehow represents a particular moment in time. I thought the whole point of relativity is that there are no absolute time slices in spacetime.

drostie 12y ago
Yes, it's still true when we take special relativity into account. One good perspective on special relativity is that it sort of says, "everybody's right." That is, you abstract your "present" moment to distant positions as a 3d plane in the 4d space; someone else at the same position with a different velocity will have their present too, and those will not be 100% commensurate, but that's OK -- both of you have valid coordinate systems for any calculations you want to accomplish. The family of all the "presents" of a point in spacetime is the set of all points which are spacelike-separated from that point -- i.e. if that point is at the origin of some coordinate system, the complete "relativistic present" is all of those points such that c² t² − x² − y² − z² < 0 Every observer passing through a point agrees upon these points exactly; the only difference is that my t=0 will not correspond to t' = 0 under a Lorentz transform, so that my "simultaneous" at space-separated points is not someone else's "simultaneous" at those points. (Light bubble picture: imagine that the light which shines upon an event in spacetime expands outwards with speed c, forming an expanding bubble of light. Consider two events. They are both "simultaneous" in the sense that there is an observer who thinks that they are simultaneous, if their light bubbles start out topologically disconnected and overlap eventually. They are both "time-ordered" in the other case, if one bubble is inside the other. If two things are objectively time-ordered then they are not objectively space-separated, because the points in the larger bubble correspond to valid inertial trajectories of a spaceship going less than the speed of light -- there are some spaceships which visited both events inertially. Similarly if two things are objectively space-separated then they are not objectively time-ordered; consider someone on the intersection of the two light bubbles seeing both events happen "right now"; there is always a velocity vector such that they will trace the distances back to the origins of the events as equal -- and hence that observer thinks that both happened simultaneously at their different locations.)

chriswarbo 12y ago

There's a related idea called the "transactional interpretation" of quantum mechanics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation The idea is that every event (eg. a particle collision) sends waves forwards and backwards in time, eg. if * is an event and </> are waves moving backwards/forwards in time: <- past future -> <<<<<<<<<*>>>>>>>>> The waves from multiple events can overlap and interfere, eg. <<<<<<<<<<<<*>>>>> <<<*>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The interference depends on the phase of the waves, but let's simplify and say that similar arrows are destructive (represented as a space) and opposite arrows are constructive (represented as a dash). In which case, the interference pattern of the example above would be: *--------* It looks like there is something which is created at the first event, travels through time to the second event, and is then destroyed. That "thing" is what we'd call a particle. This idea is called "transactional" because it treats the existence of a particle as not just depending on the event which creates it, but also on the event which eventually destroys it, and the interference of these "waves through time" is like a 'negotiation' between the two events.

drostie 12y ago
It'd be interesting to know how they deal with the phase requirements--normally you have boundary conditions which set up these sorts of standing waves but it sounds like these "events" would not have that and thus would have to conspire their phases so that you wouldn't get something more like: ---* *--- Probably it's something like, "each event must exist on at least two different fields; if you look at the other (~) field too then this event looks like ---*~~~~~~~~*--- so that, for example, this electron clearly collided with a high-energy photon to become a muon for a time and then relaxed back to being an electron, emitting the photon back."
loceng 12y ago
Appreciate your explanation - thanks.

scotty79 12y ago

It's really neat that electrons and positrons traveling in time just bounce of photons, that are timeless (because of the speed they have). I wonder what cool observation might make by similarly rotating they intuition 90 degrees so that time becomes axis something can move on.

krylon 12y ago

Not being a physicist (not even close), I find it amazing how within just ~100 years, "our" model of the universe has changed so drastically. I once read that sometime in the late 1800s, people assumed that they had basically understood how the universe works, and that all that was left was to fill in some of the blanks. And now look what an increasingly strange (and wonderful!) place we find ourselves in.