Changing the world, one idea at a time
Special relativity is that being inside a plane going at a constant speed is like being stationary, because time and space change to keep it so. General relativity extends special relativity to explain the acceleration of gravity by changes in space and time as well.
QR5.4.1. Free-fall is Acceleration
QR5.4.2. The Gravity Gradient
QR5.4.3. Unstoppable
QR5.4.4. Gravity Curves Space
QR5.4.5. Gravity Slows Time
QR5.4.6. Black Holes
Electrons constantly move because they are only one-dimensional matter, so photons in their other two dimensions cause movement. The hybrid is held together by quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that unifies entities that restart at the same point. However when quarks fill all the channels of a plane, and combine into protons and neutrons at an angle, the distribution is symmetric, so most matter doesn’t inherently move in any direction.
Quarks occupy a point, but still have free channels for photons to occupy as higher generations show, so they can acquire extra photons to move as electrons do. Hence, light hitting a solar sail makes it move, even though photons have no mass. The sail matter absorbs the photons hitting it which bias its distribution in their direction, so it moves.
Matter then moves by acquiring photons that bias its distribution one way. It already trembles in all directions with a probability based on the field density, so photons that increase that density one way make it move that way. Matter moves when the quantum field around it changes, not because particles push it.
That matter moves by adding photons also explains why mass increases as objects go faster. More photons mean more competition for channels, and more interference increases the processing that in this model is mass. The increase isn’t linear because interference doesn’t increase linearly with load, as networks like the Internet show. As relativity says, the mass increase tends to infinity as movement approaches the speed of light.
Note that when matter acquires photons that bias its distribution, they stay with it, so it carries on moving that way. We call the tendency of matter to carry on moving inertia, and assume it is a property of some substance, but here it is actually a property of the quantum field.
In the next section, gravity is how the distribution of large bodies like the sun affects the matter around them, even at great distances, with no particles needed at all.
According to quantum theory, a point of matter doesn’t sit at a fixed point but trembles about its quantum distribution. Schrödinger deduced this zitterbewegung or quantum fuzziness from the Dirac equation. Point matter is then indeed at a point but not always the same one, like a dot that is constantly redrawn, so it appears as a fuzzy patch. In Newton’s terms then, the hand of God does tremble, and it stops painting when the canvas moves.
Light advances every quantum cycle, which is about 1043 times a second, so it moves about 300 million meters in a second. If matter moved like this, rockets could go to the moon in about a second, but it can’t. Matter restarts as often as light moves but can’t teleport every time, or it would have no life, so matter trembles slower than light moves.
Even so, atoms constantly jiggle about at what is to us a fantastic rate, so why don’t they constantly move as light does? The answer lies in the quantum distribution within which they move. If that distribution is symmetric, or equal in every direction, these tiny movements just cancel out, so quantum trembling itself doesn’t make matter move.
Yet that all matter particles inherently jitter about means they don’t have to be pushed to move. Materialism sees matter as an inert substance that only moves when pushed, but quantum theory suggests that matter is always moving already, but just equally in every direction.
It follows that if the distribution around matter becomes biased one way, it will tremble that way more often, which adds up to cause macroscopic movement in our time. What moves matter is then not the push of particles, but distribution changes that bias its inherent trembling, so what could cause that?
An objective space has only one type of movement, of the object, but virtual spaces allow two. In Figure 5.7, a program can move the car by shifting its pixels one way, or it can leave the car center-screen and scroll the background behind it. Click on the Figure link to see a video of the car moving, then note that actually the car is still and only its background moves. To distinguish these two methods, let an image that moves across a screen be absolute movement, and an image that is stationary as its background moves be relative movement.
If our space is virtual, light could move absolutely while matter moves relatively. The claim of special relativity that light moves absolutely while matter moves relatively then makes sense, but how can matter change the space around it?
Until now, quantum entities were assumed to teleport absolutely but what if they don’t? If a teleport is a server restart from a new point, it could just use the new point’s connections and stay where it is. This is easier than relocating to a new point, and the effect for us is that space moves. The space of a quantum entity is its distribution, each point of which is also a source with its own distribution. Matter then teleports by acquiring a new distribution, or space, but actually stays at the same point, so it moves by changing the space around it, as special relativity says.
This explains why the speed of light is constant. If matter moves relatively, by changing the space around it, light will always leave a moving rocket at the speed of light, because in absolute terms, the rocket isn’t moving at all! This also explains why light from the sun passes rockets going to and from the sun at the same speed (Figure 5.6).
That matter moves by changing its space seems strange, but no other theory explains why special relativity works. Particles can’t, because they move absolutely, but the evidence for relativity is firm. Einstein’s equations work but don’t explain how dead matter changes space and time, yet processing allows it.
To understand this, imagine sitting in a moving car and watching trees and houses scroll by. It feels as if the world is moving around you, and special relativity agrees that space moves but matter doesn’t. This why a ball thrown up in a moving car behaves just as if the car is still, and why the laws of physics on our moving earth are the same everywhere else in the universe.
Why then does time dilate when matter moves, as special relativity says? For matter, time ticks by as cycles complete but if it teleports, the cycle ends with a connection reset not a life event. For example, a muon in space lives for about a millionth of a second, until a neutrino hit decays it into an electron, anti-neutrino, and muon neutrino. But if it moves faster, it lives longer because a teleport before a neutrino hit dodges the bullet, so it lives on. In general, a quantum cycle can be a life event or a teleport, so matter can live or move, but not both at once. An entity that spends a cycle changing its distribution loses a life event, so its time dilates, as special relativity says.
Equally, when matter teleports in any direction, any measure made that way is reduced, so space contracts in that direction, again as special relativity says.
According to relativity, every bit of matter has its own frame of reference, as if it had its own clock and map, and quantum realism agrees. If matter maps the space around it by its quantum distribution, and its time is quantum cycles completed, both can change when it moves by teleport. This explains why time dilates and space contracts as matter moves, but what decides which way it moves?
In this model, light has a constant speed because it is passed it on at a constant rate. Light waves move forward because every point is a wave source, so the wave-front advances but the backwards spread cancels out, as Huygens proposed (3.1.2). It is also a processing wave that can restart at any point where it overloads the network, in what we call a physical event.
By the same model, an electron is light trapped at a point in a standing wave, so while light moves constantly and occasionally restarts, matter restarts constantly and doesn’t move, on one or more dimensions. A photon then is like a boat with an engine that moves it forward, but matter is like a boat with two engines that oppose, so it stays in one place. Yet even a stationary boat with active engines spreads ripples around itself, so matter has a distribution just as light does.
Matter then shouldn’t move but it does, and even goes where light can’t. Light from a lamp in a metal box can’t get out but an electron inside an impenetrable Gaussian field can suddenly appear outside it, like a marble in a sealed bottle popping up outside it. Physics calls this quantum tunneling, when matter doesn’t take a path to a destination but instantly arrives there. The electron can’t travel a path through the field around it, so it just teleported out.
How could it do this? Recall that in quantum theory, when a photon reaches a screen, its distribution instantly collapses to a point physical event. A matter point doing the same could then instantly appear anywhere in its distribution, in what we call a teleport. This explains quantum tunneling, as the electron’s distribution can spread beyond an impenetrable field. Note that a photon in a metal box can’t teleport out because its wave front reaches the walls before its distribution spreads beyond it, so it always collapses back inside the box. The same quantum rules apply to matter and light, as both are processing that spreads in diminishing ripples, and can restart anywhere in their distribution, based on its strength at each point.
In summary, light moves by point-to-point transfer and occasionally teleports, but matter only moves by teleport. This explains why light moves inherently but matter doesn’t, but not why the speed of light is constant as matter moves. Why does light from a fast-moving rocket still leave it at the speed of light? Relativity says that matter changes its space, but how could it do that?
If light moved by itself alone, it could just go faster and faster, but it doesn’t. Current physics knows that light moves at a fixed speed in space, but why isn’t clear. It is just given, but light as a wave of processing spreading on a network can only move as fast as the network passes it on. The speed of light in space is then 299,792,458 meters per second, no more and no less, because of how often space refreshes, so the speed of light is really the speed of space (3.2.4).
Similarly matter particles moving by themselves should be able to go at any speed, but special relativity makes them go slower than light, and common sense can’t say why. It also makes the speed of light constant however matter moves, so light from a fast rocket still leaves at the speed of light. Relativity says that light moves absolutely but matter moves relatively, but why is it so?
QR5.3.1. Matter Teleports
QR5.3.2. Space Moves
QR5.3.3. Matter Trembles
QR5.3.4. The Photon Effect
Light goes at the fantastic speed of 670 million miles per hour, which is all the way to the moon and back in less than a second. Can we achieve this speed? What if a rocket going at half the speed of light shot a bullet forward at half the speed of light? Unfortunately, doing this changes time and space, so the bullet only goes at four-fifths the speed of light!
What if we gradually accelerate a rocket up to the speed of light? Nature again intervenes by increasing the rocket mass until at near the speed of light its near infinite mass needs a near infinite force to move it, so this doesn’t work either. In theory, in a rocket going 5mph slower than the speed of light, one could throw a ball at 5mph per hour to reach the speed of light but in practice, we can’t produce the force needed to throw the ball. And if the rocket had headlights, one might expect light to leave it at almost twice the speed of light, but again Nature plays with space and time to keep the speed of light the same.
This denies the conservation of mass and the thermodynamic law that energy in a closed system can’t be lost, but Einstein noted that energy and mass convert by E=mc2, so nothing is really lost. He didn’t say whether mass was a form of energy, energy a form of mass, or both were aspects of something else.
Relativity contradicts all our intuitions about movement. For example, if two rockets left the earth at half the speed of light, one to the sun and one to Pluto (Figure 5.6), relativity requires light from the sun to pass both rockets at the same speed! How can the same photon pass both rockets, one going to the sun and one away from it, at the same speed? This makes no sense in classical terms.
In relativity, as in quantum theory, the equations work but they don’t make any sense. How can space that is the measure of movement, itself move? How can time that is the measure of change, itself change? It cannot be, yet the evidence is that it is so.
Einstein deduced that space and time had to change for our world to be as it is, but didn’t say why. Perhaps he expected physics to explain later but a century on, we are no wiser. To unravel this mystery, of how matter changes space and time, it must be a product painted not a substance.
That time slows down and distance shortens as matter moves faster, to keep the speed of light constant, has interesting implications. In a classic thought experiment, Einstein imagined a twin leaving on a rocket who returns after five years of high-speed space travel to find his twin brother on earth is an old man of eighty! This could happen because a muon traveling at 99.5% of the speed of light should travel 300 meters in its millionth of a second life, but actually travels 3,000m, so speed extends its life tenfold. Relativity lets in a rocket accelerating at one g get to our nearest galaxy and back in 60 years but it would return to an earth that is four million years older (Harrison, 1986, p157). The facts agree that time slows down as matter moves faster, but what does this mean?
Newton believed that God painted matter objects on a universal canvas but Einstein replaced his view with equations that change the space-time canvas. If we keep the analogy, then what is painted isn’t just the object but also its time, as if movement and time use the same paintbox, painting the first more leaves less paint for the second. The next section explores the concept that a finite source produces both movement and time in more detail.
Einstein’s equations make time stop at the speed of light, so a matter clock sitting on a photon wouldn’t tick at all. Light from the Andromeda galaxy takes 2.5 million years to arrive on earth, but according to relativity, no time at all passes for the light itself. It also starts and ends its journey at the same location by length contraction! Needless to say, this makes no sense, as how can light move at all if its time stops? The alternative is that matter time doesn’t apply to light.
Why is the speed of light constant instead of say, the speed of lead? What makes light the gold standard of movement? One reason relates to the role of light in causality. Imagine a rocket going to a planet at nearly light speed and then returning to earth. If the rocket’s speed altered the speed of light, a message sent on the way to the planet might arrive after one sent coming back. If the rocket exploded after rounding the planet, one might first see the blast, then get a message from the crew that all is well, like getting a cheery Facebook message from a person after attending their funeral. Relativity keeps the causality implied by light messages in the right order.
It turns out that if a rocket could leave the earth faster than light, it could in theory go back in time to return before it left. As Buckley points out, given faster than light travel, relativity, and causality, a universe can support two but not all three at once. Going faster than light would breach the causality of events we observe, but it doesn’t happen because light, the messenger of causality, never reports events backwards.
This suggests that light moves differently from matter. If matter and light moved the same way, then light would need a push to go faster again when it slowed down in water say, but needless to say, it doesn’t. Light speeds up when going from water to a vacuum with no push needed.
In general, it takes work to move matter, and it takes work to stop light moving. If I drive at 100mph and throw a brick forward at 10mph, it goes at about 110mph, but on a rocket going at half the speed of light, light goes forward at exactly the speed of light! How then does light, and only light, do this?
Einstein analyzed why the speed of light stays constant as follows. He imagined a moving train where a floor light reflects from a mirror up on the ceiling. A train passenger sees the light go straight up and down, but a platform observer sees it travel a longer path in the same time (Figure 5.4). If both observers have the same time and space, they will get a different speed of light, and so different physics.
It followed that space had to shrink and time dilate to keep the speed of light constant. Lorentz saw his transformations as mathematical curiosities, but Einstein saw them as what made Poincare’s relativity work. He saw that for the universe to be as Poincare described, space and time had to change as Lorentz described. If space and time didn’t change to make physics invariant (Note 1), light would have a different speed for every observer!
The implications of this conclusion are strange indeed. For example, imagine a rocket flying past a space station in orbit (Figure 5.5). It seems impossible that people on the rocket and on the space station both get the same speed of light, but they do! If they didn’t, our physics wouldn’t work on Mars.
But who is really moving – is the rocket going past the space station, or is the space station passing the rocket? It turns out that it doesn’t matter. If the rocket moves, its space and time contract and dilate, and if the space station moves, the same applies. Regardless of how the rocket and station move relative to each other, distance and time change just enough to keep the speed of light the same for both.
This defies common sense, but experiments have verified that time and space really do change as matter moves faster or slower. It seems weird, but as Einstein said, this is why our universe isn’t weird. Our universe is normal because the speed of light is the same everywhere in it.
Note 1. Einstein preferred the term invariance for his theory but relativity stuck.