@TerryBollinger

11 months ago

Ah, you are a bold person! The directional lightspeed situation is delightful since special relativity requires “reciprocal equivalence” (my phrase), meaning that given some number R, the Ratio, there is no local test one can perform to disprove that light travels at cR in one direction — any direction — and c/R in the opposite direction. For example, if you are talking to someone 1 meter in front of you, you cannot devise any physics test to disprove that light takes one billion years to travel from your face to theirs, yet is, for all practical purposes, instantaneous in the opposite direction. It cannot be genuinely instantaneous since it must be a reciprocal of the other speed of light for the math to work out correctly. But you can get so close that it makes no practical difference. What’s extraordinary is that this is not just some mathematical abstraction but an absolute requirement of how special relativity works. Even though the tests have no meaning to you, there could be an observer for whom they represent very real delays, in which time for you is asynchronous to an extraordinary degree. I’m working on an Apabistia Note called Einstein’s Unfinished Homework that starts with the same lighting and train example. The part Einstein never finished was how to calculate the delay in the flashes of lightning. The missing math is to multiply the signed distance between flashes by an “age gradient” alpha, which is: α = -βγ/c For a train 0.3 km long traveling at 0.6 c with flashes that appear synchronous inside the train, anyone on the embankment sees the back flash occurring 0.6 microseconds before the front flash — that is, the back always appears older than the front. Einstein never finished his thought problem by writing down the equation because the concept of an internally asynchronous object went a bit too far. If you follow that idea to its logical conclusion, the very concept of an object breaks down into a sequence of probabilistically linked but otherwise isolated spacetime events. That’s going a bit too far from the classical viewpoint for most people, even now, let alone a century ago. Object-ness is one of our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of the universe. It is also, alas, flatly incorrect. There are only spacetime events, and the only self-consistent, non-paradoxical separation metrics possible are the ones that separate such spacetime events, not objects. We humans, in particular, love to string events together in ways that create what we think of as objects, but that’s not the deeper fabric. -------- Regarding going faster than light using quantum mechanics, I remember that tunneling issue from Sabine’s video. I believe I both commented on it and emailed her directly. The correct resolution is oddly simple: While the tunneling is, indeed, “instantaneous” (wow, that word so oversimplifies it), the spread of the Schrödinger wave that enables the tunning is bound by the speed of light. Without that wavefront first passing by, there is no tunneling and, thus, no dissemination of information faster than lightspeed. Any mathematical analysis more complicated than that is mostly noise. In other words, you can’t send information faster than the speed of light, not because tunneling is too slow, but because the Schrödinger wave expansion is too slow. Finite Schrödinger wave expansion brings up another rather critical issue, which is that quantum mechanics is no more fundamental than classical mechanics, or for that matter, special relativity. All three are pieces of a single fabric, all three are emergent, and all three have limitations. The critical limitation in the case of quantum mechanics is the non-existence of Hilbert space… which, unfortunately, is also the foundation of most modern quantum mechanics. Hilbert space simplifies quantum states by assuming they are preexisting and infinitely precise. That’s nonsense since nothing in the physical world works that way. Schrödinger waves are laboratory phenomena, and all observations of them, including in commercially available quantum encryption devices, require them to start at a precise location in classical space and then spread at no faster than the speed of light. That critical limitation time-spread limitation cannot be adequately represented using only a Hilbert space. Thus, laboratory-consistent Schrödinger waves are never infinite in scope and always require a finite time to traverse space and become “more” perfect. That is the core of why quantum mechanics cannot be the deeper infrastructure of the universe. More later, maybe, I must leave for the airport early tomorrow. (Two PDFs of this 2023-06-01 comment are available at sarxiv dot org slash apa)

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