Physics doesn’t know as much as they seem to let on about the nature of time/events and about wave/particle duality and where these things arise from. I was thinking about it this afternoon and i jotted this down. I’m sure this is a pre-existing idea, though i have never heard it discussed. I’d like to get some Doper takes on the nature of time and particles.
Debate: On a fundamental level, what is time, and what is matter?
Here’s what i jotted down:
An event is a point in 4 dimensional space-time just as a particle is a point in a 3 dimensional matter-wave. In neither case does the point prove useful except as a reference from which to preform measurements, the true nature of these objects is obviously much larger, but in order to be perceived our minds and machines condense them through measurement.
In the case of the event the true nature is obviously a continuum of change, an event is simply a convenient slice of this ever morphing reality that is capable of being chemically recorded in our brains. It is this same bias that prevents us from perceiving the mathematical and probabilistic nature of the matter field. It can only be recorded in discrete units by the devices that we have at our disposal, namely, our chemical synapses and “bit” based machines. So, while the matter itself is not condensed by our measurements into point particles, all measurements we take will naturally perceive that they have been.
So, in my view
Time = a measurement of change in a system. Time is not a “dimension”, but an intrinsic function of matter and energy.
Matter = is a measurement of energy at a specific location in space. Matter, at it’s most elementary, is a field. An effect of our perception is to pinpoint it to the most likely location.
If this is an issue for QM, isn’t it also an issue for anything continuous? If we can’t perceive “the mathematical and probabilistic nature of the matter field” because our brains are discrete then can we perceive anything (continuous) mathematical or probabilistic?
When we discuss and claim to understand any continuous phenomenon, don’t we do so using discrete symbols? We say “the cardinality of the open interval (0,1) equals the cardinality of the set of real numbers” we are discussing continua using a finite number of discrete symbols but nobody suggests that this means that we can’t perceive continua or that if we couldn’t, it would be more of an issue for QM than anything else.
It seems to me that our inability to visualize quantum phenomena probably says something very profound about our minds but nothing very profound about the phenomena themselves.
I would say energy should fit into as well, right? I mean after all, could either time or matter exist without it? “Time as we see it”, or human perceived passing of events, is almost a window into what all this other stuff might really be. Think of strobe lights and movie projectors, you are looking at static frames the whole time, but experience stringed together events. Energy as matter in space-time, could be seen similarly, only snippets of anything are anywhere as anything at any given point.