Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Continuing problems with Time

Further confused rumination about time and quantum probability waves. I don't understand how it's possible to have a universe-wide probability wave for a particle with mass. Not in the sense of instantly collapsing the wave to a point, as described in the book, but in the sense that it's supposed to be impossible for a particle to travel faster than light. Which means that a particle's probability wave must be bounded by the speed of light. It's not enough to say that the probability approaches 0 at a radius in space-time defined by how far light can travel, it should be 0. Otherwise we've broken Relativity, or something.

If I understand it all correctly to say that a particle has a 2^-500 chance of appearing some number of light years away from here in the next few seconds is tantamount to saying that it has that much chance of traveling backwards in time. Which might be a miniscule probability but the universe has a disgustingly large number of particles. So many that even tiny probabilities must occur some number of times. I'm not a mathematician and I'm not going to try and figure out hard numbers. Unless the notion of quantum probability has been described incorrectly in the book it just doesn't mesh with Relativity. Then again... I think that's sort of the point to current theoretical physics isn't it? >.>


(Note: This post is slightly out out of order, it sat as a draft for a week or more)

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