Changing the world, one idea at a time
Special relativity makes being inside a plane going at a constant speed 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 Changes Space
QR5.4.5. Gravity Changes Time
QR5.4.6. Black Holes
Electrons constantly move because they are only one-dimensional matter, so photons can fill other dimensions to cause movement. The hybrid is held together because quantum entanglement unifies entities that restart at the same point. But when quarks combine into protons and neutrons, the distribution is symmetric, so atoms don’t usually move in any direction.
Yet quarks at a point still have free channels for photons to occupy, as higher generations show, so atoms can acquire extra photons to move as electrons do. Hence, light hitting a solar sail moves it, even though photons have no mass. The sail matter absorbs the photons hitting it which bias its distribution in their direction, so it moves that way.
Matter can move by acquiring photons that bias its distribution one way. It already trembles in all directions, so photons that increase the field strength one way make it move that way more often. The sail moves because the quantum field around it changes not because particles push it.
This 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. Mass then increases as movement increases, as relativity states.
Note that when matter acquires photons that make it move, they stay with it, so it carries on moving the same way. Physics calls the tendency of matter to carry on moving inertia, and assume it is an inherent property, but here it is caused by matter acquiring photons that bias its distribution.
Photons explain how matter moves but not how gravity works. The next section examines how a large mass like the earth can move the matter around it, even at great distances.
According to quantum theory, a point of matter doesn’t sit at a fixed point but trembles about its quantum distribution. Schrödinger deduced this quantum fuzziness from the Dirac equation and he called it zitterbewegung. Point matter is then indeed at a point but not always the same one, like a dot constantly redrawn by a painter whose hand trembles, so it appears as a fuzzy patch.
Light advances every quantum cycle at 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 they move within. 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 matter particles constantly jitter about means they don’t have to be pushed to move. Inert matter only moves when pushed, but in quantum theory, matter is always moving already, just equally in every direction. It follows that if the distribution around matter becomes asymmetric, it will tremble one way more often to cause macroscopic movement in our time. Matter can then move due to distribution changes that bias its inherent trembling, but 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, we can move the car by shifting its pixels one way, or 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 the car stays still as its background moves. To distinguish these two methods, let moving an image across a screen be absolute movement, and moving the background behind a stationary image be relative movement.
If our space is virtual, movement can be absolute or relative, so Einstein’s claim that light moves absolutely but matter doesn’t could make sense, but how can matter change its background?
In this model, matter moves by teleport, but is it absolute or relative? A teleport is an entity restart from a new point, and the simplest way to do this is to use the new point’s connections from where it is. Processing at a point can’t instantly relocate to a new point but it can change its connections, which in effect changes the space around it.
This is possible because the space around a quantum entity is its distribution, each point of which is a source with its own distribution. Matter can then teleport by acquiring a new distribution, or space, but actually stay at the same point. It then moves by changing the space around it, just as special relativity says.
This logic 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 is odd but no other theory explains special relativity. Particles that move absolutely can’t, but the evidence for relativity is firm. Einstein’s equations don’t explain how dead matter changes space and time, but processing does.
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 your space is moving but you aren’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 throughout 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 only a millionth of a second until a neutrino hit decays it 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 teleport 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.
Relativity gives every bit of matter its own frame of reference, as if it had its own clock and map, and quantum realism agrees. Matter maps the space around it by its quantum distribution, and its time ticks by as life cycles complete, but a teleport changes both. Time then dilates and space contracts as matter moves, but what decides the direction in which it moves?
In this model, light has a constant speed because it is passed on at a constant rate. Each point of the quantum network passes its activity to its neighbors every cycle, so every point of a light wave is a source of new waves, as Huygens proposed. Light then moves forward because the wave-front advances but the backward spread cancels out (3.1.2). As a processing wave, it can also restart at any point where it overloads the network, in what we call a physical event.
By the same model, matter is light trapped at a point in a standing wave, so while it moves constantly and occasionally restarts, matter restarts constantly and doesn’t move on one or more dimensions. Light is like a boat whose engine moves it forward but matter is like a boat with 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 quantum distribution just as light does.
According to this model then, matter shouldn’t move, but it does, and it 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 must have teleported out.
How could it do this? Recall that in quantum theory, when a photon reaches a screen, its wave function 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. Quantum tunneling is then explained by quantum collapse, where an entity restarts at a point in its distribution based on its strength.
In summary, light moves by point-to-point transfer but occasionally teleports when it collapses at a screen point, but matter as a standing wave that constantly restarts can only move by teleport. Quantum tunneling then isn’t just how matter sometimes moves, but how it always does. If light is a wave not a particle, and matter is a standing wave of light, matter can move as light sometimes does by quantum collapse, so the same rules apply to matter and light.
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 and time, 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, so light from a fast rocket still leaves it at the speed of light. In relativity, light moves absolutely while matter moves relatively, but why?
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 to the moon and back in less than a second, so 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 seems to deny 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. And if mass equates to energy, both could be 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! But 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. No doubt he expected physics to explain it later but a century on, we are no wiser. All we know is that light defines the speed limit of our universe, so matter can never go faster than it. A wave model explains why, but if matter is a standing wave, how does it move at all?
Special relativity requires time to slow down for matter objects as they move faster to keep the speed of light constant. Einstein didn’t explain why, but in this model it is because moving faster increases the quantum network load, so life events occur slower, just as a game slows down when the computer is busy with a big battle (2.3.1). Likewise, our game of life slows down under load.
His example of a twin leaving on a rocket who returns after years of high-speed space travel to find his twin brother on earth is an old man then could happen. Experiments confirm that a muon traveling at 99.5% of the speed of light which should travel 300 meters in its millionth of a second life, actually travels 3,000m, so speed extended its life tenfold. Relativity lets a rocket accelerating at one g go 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). For the rocket crew, time would pass as usual, but they are actually in slow motion, as thousands of years pass on earth for each of their years.
Relativity implies that time stops 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 of our 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? It can’t, so matter time doesn’t apply to light.
Time passes for matter when it doesn’t move, which allows life events to occur, but light never stops, so its time doesn’t pass that way. A standing wave that always moves is no longer a standing wave, so matter can’t move as light does. Light is then the ultimate messenger because as a wave, it can always move at the speed limit of our universe.
Why is the speed of light constant instead of say, the speed of lead? What makes light the gold standard of movement? One possibility is its role 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 could arrive after one sent coming back. Hence, if the rocket exploded after rounding the planet, one might first see the blast then get a crew message that all is well, like getting a cheery email from a person after attending their funeral. In our world, causality is always maintained because the speed of light is always constant.
In theory, a rocket that left earth faster than light could 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 can’t happen because light, the messenger of causality, doesn’t allow it.
Does light then move 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, and light speeds up when going from water to a vacuum with no push needed.
In general, it takes effort to move matter but it takes effort to slow light down. A brick thrown at 10mph from a car going at 100mph leaves at about 110mph, but light leaves a rocket going at half the speed of light at exactly the speed of light! How does light, and only light, do this?
To simplify the problem, Einstein reduced it to why the speed of light stays constant for any observer. He imagined a train, with a light on the floor that shines up to a mirror on the ceiling, then reflects back (Figure 5.4). A train passenger sees the light go straight up and down, and when the train moves nothing changes, but an observer on a platform watching the train go by sees it travel a longer path. If both observers have the same time and space, the speed of light will be different, but in our world it isn’t. Einstein deduced that space and time had to change to keep the speed of light constant.
Lorentz saw his transformations as mathematical curiosities but Einstein saw that they made Poincare’s relativity work, so 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), the speed of light would vary with every observer!
The implications of his 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 see light moving at the same speed, but they do! If they didn’t, our physics wouldn’t work on Mars.
One could ask who is really moving, the rocket or the space station, but in relativity 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. Reality remains invariant because the speed of light is the same everywhere.
Note 1. Einstein preferred the term invariance for his theory but relativity stuck.