Superposition of Time

What if time isn’t linear? What if time can be pooled upon itself, offering a way to dive into the now, then, and what-will-be? 

What if? 

Time has a fundamentally different character in quantum mechanics and in general relativity. In quantum theory events unfold in a fixed order while in general relativity temporal order is influenced by the distribution of matter. When matter requires a quantum description, temporal order is expected to become non-classical—a scenario beyond the scope of current theories.


Comments

4 responses to “Superposition of Time”

  1. Hence the quest for a unified field theory. The quantuum method of modeling events over time works well for some applications, and the relativistic method of modeling events over time works well for other applications, but the two methods have, so far, resisted attempts to reconcile them.

  2. And the weird thing is for time, quantum mechanics seems the more comprehensible. Yeah, relativity is mind-bending, but really not that difficult to grasp, while experts in quantum mechanics have said that if one thinks they understand, they are wrong.

    1. McChuck Avatar
      McChuck

      That’s the pernicious effect of Copenhagen interpretation working on you. I don’t hold with the voodoo version of physics. Boehm had it right, or close enough.

  3. McChuck Avatar
    McChuck

    That works for stories, but not in reality.

    There is no real dispute between quantum and relativistic time. It’s just that most people don’t think clearly, forget what ‘quantum’ means, and apply relativity beyond its limits.

    The hard part is understanding that there is a universal time, and there is a local time, and the two don’t ever match up. Things like photons and gravity work on universal time, because they have no local time of their own.

    The study of time is fascinating, because it’s all tied up with the study of space. What you really need to understand is motion – the interaction of time with space. That is the key.