Abstract
So now that we understand something about probability and the distinguishing between things which have been determined and things which have been predicted, we’re now going to do a funny kind of about-face. In the second chapter we showed how things can be determined, in the classical sense, entirely in probability space. Now we’re going to turn around and ask which, of all possible probabilities, are the probabilities which are allowed to be determined?
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- 1.
Yes I mean imaginary in the complex sense, but also in the sense that goes with common vernacular.
- 2.
Remember we introduced the term “field-like” as a proxy for non-local late in Chap. 2 We’re sticking with it because it’s still not clear whether space is fully quantized, but the important thing to note here is that we’re going to build a description of space that is imprecise and field-like, allowing for it to be referenced as a semiotic as much as an actual physical measurable thing, and that’s imperative for our discussion to move forward.
- 3.
Just a little extra to explain where we’re going with this—say we set up a computer simulation that chose at random, some closed 3D shape and then sent waves propagating through that closed shape, and then simulated some marbles moving around in that shape, interacting with said waves. Then say we had the computer change the shape of the box as often as it updated the positions of the atoms. You would get marbles moving around the way quantum objects move around.
- 4.
We could argue that in fact these things arise from the discontinuous reflections of the waves off of the boundary, which only really arises due to friction, which could be considered in part a QM issue, but suffice to say that waves and interference are widely considered classical phenomena.
- 5.
Much the same way that our wave, in the beginning of this chapter, was observed directly and the possible sources were constructed and weighed against possible obfuscations and eventually chosen based on probability—but constructed, not observed.
- 6.
Check out the book by Amadeo Balbi The Music Of The Big Bang for a good outside popular science source on the fundamental frequencies of the big bang. After looking at the actual frequencies it really does start to look like someone rung a giant bell—but a really deep crunchy kind of bell. The big mystery, however, lies in how each fizzle and pop within the crunch led to the fundamental particles and eventually galaxies that are here today, which we’ll talk more about in Chap. 6
- 7.
Anything that’s not empty space now, on the other hand, is the stuff that kept on howling down in probability spaces closer to us, with much louder probability waves.
- 8.
This is a difficult point to make but it is going to set the tone for why everything gets inverted from large to small, why light can reflect off surfaces, why friction exists, why all sorts of stuff happens the way it happens, so take a moment to really try to understand it.
- 9.
For more on this, it was Stephen Hawking who showed that quantum indeterminacies could save the standard model.
- 10.
Without going into the details, this is where Alan Guth’s theory of inflation comes in.
- 11.
For more on this see Chap. 2
- 12.
Most notably by the accomplished mathematician Sir Micheal Atiyah who specializes in geometry.
- 13.
Don’t worry, we’re not going to actually build all the properties of fundamental particles, because that would require a much more formal setting and a lot more detail, but we’re going to get you to where you can sit at the table to see how the professionals are working on it so to speak.
- 14.
Of course I’m oversimplifying here, there are more particles.
- 15.
In case you’re tempted to simply replace charge and mass with spin in terms what is the most fundamental, we’ll see later that this is not what this actually means. Spin is not a local quantity, and as such it can be very misleading to think of it as a fundamental quality of a sub-atomic particle, even if it seems to follow a particle around and be intrinsic to it.
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Bascom, G. (2017). Narrative Space. In: On the Inside of a Marble. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60690-3_3
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