Comment by vlovich123
19 hours ago
Given we haven’t bridged quantum with gravity yet, my bet is the function collapses right at the boundary when gravity starts to play a meaningful role.
That’s a more physically plausible interpretation than ever “tick” of the universe actually creates infinitely more universes because every fundamental particle is quantum and each one is constantly interacting under the wave function every plank second. And the infinite number of possible events that a single particle would experience is multiplied by the joint combination of all particles in the entire universe. It doesn’t seem plausible.
How would you define exactly ‘when gravity starts playing a role’. It always plays a role, from photons to planets.
And on the ‘every tick creates more universes’: we are completely fine with superposition in nanoscopic systems. It’s just uneasy to follow that conclusion to the logical end. Just my two cents. I think just because the conclusion seems hard to grasp, the reasoning to get there is completely sound..
“Starts to play a role” means when the effect of gravity becomes significant to the quantum equations which currently don’t have any placeholder for gravity.
Just like Newton’s equations are accurate to describe gravity and motion but only because the full equations Einstein worked simplify to them at small speeds.
So similarly it would make more sense that quantum equations and relativity are two sides of the same coin and there’s some missing mathematical bridge where at small particle sizes it simplifies to quantum and at large particle scales gravity matters and we get Newton and then further relativity.
Using Occam’s razor that’s at least my prior vs some undefined mechanism of action where all possible interactions of every particle actually creates an infinite superposition of universes where that did happen and you get an infinite number of such superpositions ad infinitum. Much easier to believe the huge gaping hole between two very accurate theories explains how quantum mechanics turns into classical mechanics, especially since we know gravity exists, what it is, and quantum mechanics can’t explain gravity.
The place where quantum and gravitational effects are thought to become significant to one another is at energy levels that cannot be obtained in our experiments, either in the lab or through astronomical observation.
6 replies →
This is more or less Roger Penrose's position: https://web.archive.org/web/20150327124054id_/http://image.s...
He argues that the wavefunction collapses on a timescale of h-bar / E_G, where E_G is the gravitational self-energy of the quantum system.
Didn’t know this but glad I’m in such distinguished company.
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