Ask A Genius 1014: Quantum world informational fidelity shading
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/16
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Have you ever seen a slider of an image enhancer? You can slide a vertical line left to right. It allows a before and after back-and-forth of the image, like a before and after acne treatment commercial or something. If Planck-scale quantum systems function below magnitudes of time and so operate bidirectionally in time, functionally, or without time in simultaneity, what if those Planck-scale quantum systems act like that image enhancer vertical line adding fidelity to the overall system as time is created?
Rick Rosner: Yes, that makes sense. In many universes or systems like universes, traditional physics has information being conserved. But in a reasonable theory of universes, you can have an increase in information, which is embodied by an increase in apparent age, a decrease in scale, which equals an increase in the size of the universe and an increase in the amount of matter. A limited number of particles can only define themselves in space to a limited extent, and that applies to any number of particles. But when you get into huge numbers of particles, the amount of definition and the smallness of scale is huge.
Jacobsen: Why do things function without time at the lower scales? What is the proper function of that? In another sense, why have that in the first place?
Rosner: If you’ve got a system with three particles in it, you can only have the amount of time it would take to get to three particles, which is virtually no time at all. Also, random variations in a very small universe like that would destroy any kind of flow of time. There’s not enough matter in there to embody any reasonable amount of time. So you get different configurations of the three particles and they might all have roughly the same apparent age of almost nothing. Could you have a timeless universe? That’s awful. A universe with a few particles would often appear to have no more than a little amount of elapsed time, and would sometimes appear to have almost zero elapsed time.
So yes, if you could artificially build a universe like that, it would have no time, would have no history. There’s not enough matter in it to give it a history. Not enough anything in it to give it a history. So in this sense, time isn’t a thing in any way at any scale of the universe. It’s merely a property of interaction. No. Not time. The apparent age of the universe is proportional to the amount of matter in the universe. So if you want the universe to get older, it’s going to have to be able to preserve some record of some of the interactions among the matter in the universe, and some of those interactions are going to have to change the curvature, the configuration of the universe so that more matter is drawn in from the edges. Even in a Big Bang universe, you see that as the universe expands, more matter slows down. More matter becomes visible, coming in from the edges, from what looks like the earliest moments of the universe from the point of view of the rest of the universe.
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