@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
Physicists, please chime in: it occurs to me that a lot of the problems we have in understanding mechanics, especially quantum mechanics, come from the fact that we are in effect experiencing a projection of a multitude of spacial dimensions onto our 4 dimensional (3 unbiased, one biased in the temporally retarded direction) perceived interactions? We might find it useful to take the kinds of projections of 3D objects onto planes in drawing, painting, and computer graphics as an analog to this.
This has been a common idea, including string theory's 11 or 26 or however many spatial dimensions (with all but 3 of them being tiny enough to not be noticeable). More recently, the discovery of AdS/CFT correspondance , in which an N-dimensional spacetime with gravity has an equivalent description as an (N-1)-dimensional spacetime without gravity (aka, the holographic principal). Interestingly, it is the lower-dimensional models that are simpler than the projections into higher-dimensional space. Unfortunately, the universe we live in is not AdS, so it's still a bit academic despite all the excitement.
Also, I need to start using "biased in the temporally retarded direction" instead of just saying I'm running late.
@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
I know that string theory and its successors kind of touched on this, but I don't really think that the real implications specifically of the projection distortion, have really been exploried.
For example, could a photon we interact with as a particle when seen from one 'angle' (metaphorically, and possibly literally), but a wave from a different angle,actually be a complex, but static and stable, structure in multiple dimensions?
Wave-particle duality happens in much more abstract, mathematical spaces in addition to spacetime. To me, it's easier to think of particles as just very localized waves.
@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
Similarly, can we resolve the apparent breakdown of local realism in Bell's theorem by viewing the two entangled 'particles' as manifestations of a single object which is contiguous in other dimensions?
I expect that this is well trod ground, but I don't know what the concensus on this currently is.
This is essentially what entanglement is, when two particles cannot be completely described as separate entities. There's one idea which says that there is a single quantum wavefunction describing the entire universe, in which everything is entangled with everything else. This is supported by Quantum Field Theory, which posits a single, universe-spanning field for each type of particle (electron, up quark, etc.) in which all individual instances of particles are mostly separate, mostly stable waves in this field.
@benjamin-hall said in Random thought of the day:
@scholrlea said in Random thought of the day:
2. It badly doesn't coexist with Einsteinian gravity (general relativity). As in "infinite amounts of infinitely hard radiation when anything moves" badly coexists.
Oh, come on. The discrepancy is only 120 orders of magnitude. Hardly infinite.
But, yeah. Experimental results are sticking stupidly close to calculations from General Relativity and the Standard Model. Particle physicists are starting to get annoyed at the lack of unexpected data.