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About this blog

My views about philosophical and scientific matters.

Entries in this blog

Physics

Non-locality or retrocausality? (and general thoughts about the universe)

I've written about these things in this blog before, but now I'd like to summarize my thoughts about how I understand the quantum mechanics and how I see the nature of the universe in general. It seems nobody understood my previous post, and probably nobody will understand this one either, but that's OK, I'm writing these primarily for myself, to gather and organize my thoughts. In the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, there is a thing called "wave function collapse", which does
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Physics

4
Physics

Entangled in Time

Let's talk about quantum entanglement. At first glance it looks like a very strange phenomenon, where the properties (like spin) of two particles coming from the same source can be measured in different points of space and time, and the results of these measurements are correlated, while still being fundamentally random. If you make a spacetime diagram of it, you get something like this: Now, I want you to think about it in a different way, similar to what I've already posted in this
Physics

More on Superdeterminism

The goal of this entry is to explain my thoughts about superdeterminism in a more detailed way. We should start with the double slit experiment: there is a source of particles, two slits, and a screen. The particles can go through either of the slits, and even if we emit a single particle at a time, after many particles there is an interference pattern at the screen, showing that the particle seems to go through both slits at the same time. But if we make a measurement to determine which sl
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Physics

12
Physics

Superdeterminism

I just watched a video from Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytyjgIyegDI She talks about an idea that can fix some problems with our understanding of quantum mechanics. And I have some things to say about it. First, I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't believe in all that free will nonsense. Second, I think the idea of superdeterminism has some very interesting implications. It states that the path of the particle depends on what you measure. But what she doesn
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Physics

13
Physics

"No two ponies are exactly the same, no two snowflakes ever match their design..."

This quote (I think you all know where it comes from) shows us that complex physical objects are all different from each other. Ranging from very big ones like galaxies, to very small like the aforementioned snowflakes, there are no two identical instances of them. But what happens if we consider really small objects, like atoms? Well, the atoms of one chemical element aren't actually all the same, but they are not all unique either. Every element has several versions called isotopes, which diff
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Physics

1
Physics

From tip to TOE

By TOE I mean "Theory of Everything". The basic rules that govern our universe (so if you think there are multiple universes, it's not really about everything). There are several attempts to unify all physics, but there is no widely accepted version of it. I have an intuition what it should be, which I'm going to share with you here. I believe the fundamental theory is not geometric. Geometry should be an emergent phenomenon, a statistical property of a large number of basic objects, someth
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Physics

5
Physics

Do Extra Dimensions Exist?

(Sorry for posting this 2 days later than usual.) In some physical theories there are not only the 4 dimensions we know (3 space and 1 time), but also some small extra ones. But they hasn't been observed yet, so do they really exist? Well, there is a very convincing argument (for me at least) that they do. It's called "CPT symmetry". Symmetry is a very important concept in physics, it means that some differences between two systems don't really affect the way they work. For example the
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Physics

3
Physics

How to Solve the Time Loop Paradox

In principle, physics doesn't forbid traveling back in time. We don't have the technology to do it, but maybe someday we will. But what about the paradoxes it causes? Well, if you go back in time and, for example, land in a distant galaxy where you don't do anything that would contradict what you already know about that place, then there is no problem. The paradox arises when you create a time loop, which means a closed chain of cause and effect. Now, if the time loop is consistent, then th
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Physics

2
Physics

The Nature of Time

What is time? According to physics, it's just another dimension. There is a slight difference between spatial and time dimensions. Basically, the distance across two or more spatial dimensions is the square root of the sum of squares of the distances in the individual dimensions (as in Pythagorean theorem). But, due to time being a different kind of dimension, the distance across a spatial dimension and a time dimension is the square root of the difference of squares. Also there is only one time
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Physics

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