4 ms·
This is the relevant quote: "But from a deep, fundamental point of view, this is nothing new," he says. A gravitational field is merely another
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
This is the relevant quote:
"But from a deep, fundamental point of view, this is
nothing new," he says. A gravitational field is merely
another environment to interact with, so invoking it
does not explain whether quantum behaviour might lead to
classical reality if gravity’s influence were
mitigated—for example, by doing the experiment in
gravity-free space.
It's an interesting piece of work, but doesn't seem to add anything fundamental to the discussion of gravity and QM. It just shows how gravity can result in decoherence if different parts of the wavefunction experience different clock rates due to gravitational fields.
- jstanley 11y agoI don't know the technical details but how would "different parts of the wavefunction experience different clock rates due to gravitational fields" ever not be the case? Every particle in the universe is acted upon by every other particle, via gravity, so does this not mean that every particle, in some small capacity, "observes" every other particle?
- marchelzo 11y agoAFAIK, the force of gravity propagates at light-speed, so every particle in the universe is not being acted upon by every other particle in the universe via gravity, because the distance between some particles is increasing faster than that due to the expansion of the universe.
- simonh 11y agoAll that means is that movements of particle A and thus changes in its gravitational field now will never reach particle B, which is so far away that the relative expansion rate is c or more. However the historical gravitational field of Particle A, the part of its field that is within particle B's light cone, will always affect particle B.
- JadeNB 11y agoWhat if the light cones of A and B don't intersect at all? There are certainly places in the universe so far apart that light not only can't now, but could never, have travelled from one to the other; that is part of why the near-isotropy of background radiation is something that needs to be explained, I thought.
- simonh 11y agoAre there regions of the universe that have never been causally connected? They all originated in the same event, so I'd be surprised if that's true, but I'm no expert. I know cosmic inflation during the big bang was superluminal, but I have to concede I'm not completely familiar with the consequences of that, so good point.
- JadeNB 11y agoIndeed, the fact that they are moving apart at superluminal speeds is exactly why they have never been causally connected. The fact that such non-causally connected islands still "look the same" is called the horizon problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem), and it is one of the issues that Guth's inflation might solve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Horizon_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Horizon_...).
- Strilanc 11y agoI think the reason it doesn't count as a measurement is that the the gravitational effects are so weak the no-far-off-particle and yes-far-off-particle outcomes overlap substantially. You start with a cross-section of where a "measurer" particle might be, and if the far-off "to-be-measured" particle is present its gravity shifts the cross-section of the measurer particle's position very slightly, but there's still a lot of overlap with the original cross-section. A proper measurement would have nearly no overlap, instead of almost complete overlap.