There are few things that surround us every instant of our lives that
remain so much a mystery as time. Is it a dimension? An immutable attribute
of our existence? Or just an illusion? Can it run backwards? Can it proceed
at different speeds?
A year or so ago, I was pondering the issue of the quantum uncertainty that
surrounds photons and the mind-boggling issue of how the position of a
physical particle can be best described by a probability wave, rather than
being known with absolute certainty.
The concept of a wave of probabilities describing the position of an object seems so
incongruous with the macro world in which we live. Or is it? We describe the
location of a photon in terms of probabilities - it MIGHT be at location [x,y,z],
but there is a probability it might also be at [x1,y1,z1], or might even be
lurking on an outer star in the Andromeda galaxy, although the probability
of that is....well, awfully small!
We are used to thinking of an object in just one place. Or are we?
Suppose I ask you where you will be at 10am tomorrow morning? You might
describe that in terms of probabilities - most likely you will be at your
office sitting at your desk (most likely), but you might have overslept and still be in
bed at home (a lesser probability), or you might have unexpectedly hopped a
plane for a brief vacation in Bermuda (much less likely), or you might even
be half your way to the moon, having stowed away on a shuttle mission (ok,
VERY unlikely). Well.... hello, this is
sounding an awful lot like the way we describe the position of that photon!
We have a set of probabilities of its location, but we won't know for sure
until we observe that photon, thereby collapsing the quantum probability
wave, and we won't know where YOU are until 10am tomorrow morning, at which
point we will know for SURE where you are at that time. We could easily
describe your expected location tomorrow at 10am in terms of a probability
wave.
There seems to be an unusually coordinate relationship between time and the
process of collapse of a quantum probability wave.
At that point a thought suddenly struck me: Perhaps
time is the way in which we experience the progressive collapse of the
quantum probability wave for the entire universe?
All objects have a quantum probability wave associated with them. For all
practical purposes, we assume that the uncertainty does not exist on the
macro level - I can see you sitting at your desk - I don't see a fuzzy
probability wave associated with your presence that also includes your being
at home. But when I take time into account, I suddenly realize that I DO see
a fuzzy wave associated with your location over the extent of your
existence.
How fast does a quantum probability wave collapse? It might be that the time
it takes to collapse is the time it takes light to travel from one boundary
to the other of the object in question. For a photon, that collapse appears
to occur almost instantaneously due to the small size of the object, but for
the entire universe which has been around for some 13-14 billion years,
perhaps it takes 13 billion years for the quantum probability wave to collapse and
we are sitting RIGHT within it as it is collapsing and continues to
collapse. And because the universe is constantly expanding, the rate of
collapse relative to the scale of the universe might even be constant so the
wave will continue to collapse without any boundary in time.
And time itself may not be uniform across all geometries and scales - Maybe
the quantum probability wave collapses at a uniform rate independent of
geometry and scales and the only difference is that time is stretched or
compressed, but because our methods of measuring time are inherently linear,
we assume that there are different time scales associated with these events.
Quantum entanglement suggests that time may be compressed to extraordinary
degrees in some cases, so it appears that there may be shortcuts through
other dimensions which allow the wave to collapse virtually
instantaneously from our 3-dimensional perspective.
Can we travel backwards? No. And why not? Because the quantum probability
wave is always collapsing - and that results in the universe moving toward a state of
higher entropy as the measure of disorder is increasing as the wave collapses and
new and different states become frozen into the historical fabric of the
universe. Moments after the Big Bang, any given particle had only a short
history of known states and positions behind it and a single, huge
probabilistic future ahead. As the wave collapses, the history becomes
larger and the future diminishes and so the number of frozen states at any
instant of time is increasing - hence the increase in entropy.
Isolated systems always move towards states of higher entropy, not lower,
and since the universe is the ultimate isolated entity,
time does have an arrow associated with it.
On another note, I think the Greeks were right -
there IS an indivisible object - too small to divide any further, only it
wasn't the atom, it was the Planck Length - that's one of the reasons I
prefer Loop Quantum Gravity over String Theory...
Comments? Think I'm nuts? Email me at
C. E. Steuart Dewar
Morganton, GA 30560 USA
December 26, 2005
Email me at
