Changing the world, one idea at a time
Special relativity explains that being inside a plane going at a constant speed is like being stationary because time and space adjust to keep it so. General relativity extends special relativity to attribute the acceleration caused by gravity to changes in space and time as well.
QR5.4.1. Free-fall is Acceleration
QR5.4.2. The Gravity Gradient
QR5.4.3. Gravity And Photons
QR5.4.4. Gravity Bends Light
QR5.4.5. Gravity Slows Time
QR5.4.6. Black Holes
An objective world has only one type of movement, that of the object, but virtual worlds always have two. In Figure 5.6, one can move the avatars to the left by moving their pixels left or by moving the forest pixels behind them right. A program can create movement by moving the object or its background as the avatars move relative to the forest. Programs can move images by bit-shifting the foreground or the background. In the first case, avatar pixels move across the screen and in the second case, the background pixels scroll behind the center-screen object’s frame of reference.
Our reality also has two movement types, of light that is absolute and of matter that is relative to its frame of reference. Light and matter move differently in our reality just as in a virtual reality. Light moves like a pixel crossing a screen while matter moves like a center-screen image whose background scrolls. The standard model assumes particles move on a stationary background but relativity describes the option to bit-shift the background. In a fast car, one can imagine being still with the world scrolling by, perhaps because it is actually so.
Light has radiant energy from its frequency but matter has kinetic energy from its movement. They seem unrelated but a solar sail moves when light hits it, so radiant energy somehow gives it kinetic energy. If matter is made of photons, then perhaps photons don’t just disappear when they hit a solar sail but join with the photons that give it mass.
If an electron point of matter can become a higher generation muon by adding photons, then every matter node has spare channels so all matter can add more photons. If a solar sail acquires photons with one direction, its quantum field will increase one way causing movement that way. If each matter node in the sail reboots every cycle at a random point depending on its quantum field, increasing the field density in one direction will increase the restart probability that way. The result over time is the macroscopic movement of the solar sail in the direction of the photons hitting it. In general, when matter acquires photons in one direction, its quantum tremble will move it that way
That matter moves when it acquires directional photons suggests that kinetic energy is passed on when one moving body hits another because the photons causing the movement are passed on. If kinetic energy arises when matter acquires photons, it has the same basis as radiant energy.
That matter moves by acquiring photons also explains why mass increases as objects go faster. The added photons increase the interference between photons competing for channels that increases the processing that in this model is mass. As more photons make matter go faster, 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.
Kinetic energy based on photon acquisition isn’t quantized because any mass size can add one photon so the change can divide to any degree. A large mass shares the effect of adding a photon so its inertia, or resistance to movement, is more because it takes more photons to move it. The kinetic energy of matter and the radiant energy of light interact because both are based on photons.
If matter moves by teleport, how does that affect time and space? In quantum realism, a photon arrives at a screen as a cloud of client instances and the first node overload to successfully restart the photon server is where it hits. Many instances arrive but only one collapses the wave function by restarting the photons server at its point. The photon spreads as a quantum wave but is detected by a point physical event.
The same applies to quantum matter but its distribution spreads around it in a sphere. Before a physical event occurs, an electron is an instance ensemble just as a photon is. But it is many photons constantly restarting in a node and servers restarting at the same time and point entangle. They jointly run all the instances distributed around the electron so any successful restart involves them all. As a result, an electron restarts as an entity every cycle and where it restarts depends on its distribution, just as for a photon. The electron’s ability to restart at a new point allows it to tunnel to a new point regardless of any intervening barriers.
For matter, a “tick” of its time passes for every processing cycle it completes in the same node but each cycle it may also interact with something else. For example, a muon hit by a neutrino decays into an electron, an antineutrino and a muon neutrino. It takes about a millionth of a second for this to happen and this is the muon’s lifetime.
Now suppose that one quantum cycle the muon restarts at another point so it moves. As the distribution around a muon is weaker than at the center, a neutrino strike there won’t give a decay. If a neutrino was about to strike where the muon was, moving extended its lifetime by one cycle. By moving the muon dodged the neutrino bullet so the teleport cycle added to its lifetime.
For a muon, life events and movement events share a fixed resource, quantum cycles, that give one or the other but not both at once. A quantum cycle can be either a life event or a teleport so as a muon moves faster, more teleports replace life events so its lifetime increases. Time dilates for the muon as it moves faster as relativity says.
Any quantum matter entity that spends a quantum cycle “in transit” loses a life event cycle. Restarting at a new point in its distribution stops a life cycle occurring so as matter moves faster, its time dilates. If it restarts one node to the right say, any measure made in that direction is a pixel less. If one measures distance from where it is, a teleport one way shortens distance that way, and if time is measured in life events, every teleport steals a life event. Together, these two effects keep the speed of light constant as matter moves.
Figure 5.5 shows the space-time diagram of a photon passing stationary matter. The photon moves one point of distance per point of time to give a 45º line, which is the speed of light. Now suppose the matter point moves one unit towards the photon by teleport. If the axes stay as they are, it moves a distance unit closer to the photon in a unit of time but the teleport shifts the axes by a distance unit and a time unit as well. Since the photon still passes through the zero-point, shifting both axes by one means the photon line is still 45º, which is the speed of light. Relativity arises because matter movement changes the origin of time and space.
Recall the earlier example where the same photon from the sun passes rockets going in different directions from the earth at the speed of light (Figure 5.4). If the rockets and the photon move in the same way this is very strange but they don’t, as matter alters its time and space as it moves. The photon doesn’t change what it does but each rocket alters its time and space as it moves to keep the speed of light constant.
Each bit of matter has its own frame of reference, as if it had its own clock and map. Matter time is relative because it changes its reference frame as it moves. In contrast, light moves on every quantum cycle so for it, time passes absolutely. For matter to move at the speed of light, it would have to teleport every quantum cycle leaving no time for life events so its time would stop. This isn’t true for light because matter time doesn’t apply to light, as time is absolute for light but relative for matter.
Light travels at a constant speed in space because the network passes it on at a constant rate. It is a wave that moves forward because, as Huygens proposed, every point is a wave source, so the wave-front carries on but the spreads behind it tend to cancel out. It is also a processing wave, so it can restart at any point where it overloads the network, in what we call a physical event.
The same approach applied to an electron suggests that it is light trapped at a point, in a standing wave that is inherently stationary, as matter is. Light is passed on constantly until it occasionally restarts at a point, but matter constantly restarts every cycle in a physical event, so it doesn’t move like light. A photon is like a moving boat that spreads ripples behind it, while matter is like a boat with opposing engines that stays stationary, but still spreads quantum waves outwards. Hence, points of matter have a distribution just as photons do, but it spreads outwards in a sphere.
Yet we see matter move, and indeed it can move where light cannot. If a shining lamp is placed in a metal box, light can’t get out, but an electron inside an impenetrable Gaussian field can suddenly pop up outside it, like a marble in a sealed bottle suddenly appearing outside it. Physics calls this quantum tunneling, when matter doesn’t take a path to a destination but just arrives there. The electron can’t move through the field around, but it can just teleport out.
That matter can teleport then explains quantum tunneling, as a physical event can restart the electron anywhere in its distribution, which can spread beyond the apparently impenetrable field. The same rule now applies to matter and light, which is that processing on the network always spreads like ripples that diminish as they do so. Note that a photon from a lamp can’t escape from a metal box in the same way because its wave front reaches the box walls first, before its distribution has spread beyond it, so its restart always teleports it to a destination within the box.
This means that matter doesn’t move as light does. Light mostly moves by point-to-point transfer, but occasionally teleports to a random point, when a physical event occurs. In contrast, matter as a recurring overload experiences a constant series of physical events, so it only moves by teleport. Like light, it can then instantly restart at any point in its distribution, based on the strength there.
This explains how matter moves but not why the speed of light stays constant as matter moves. Why does light from a fast-moving rocket still leave it at the speed of light? According to relativity, light moves absolutely but matter moves relatively, but what does that mean?
If light moves by itself, there is no reason why it can’t just go faster and faster, but it always moves at a fixed speed for a given environment, so the speed of light is constant. In physics, the speed of light just is, but light as processing spreading on a network will move as fast as the network passes it on. The speed of light in empty space is then 299,792,458 meters per second, no more and no less, because that is how often the network of space refreshes, so it is really the speed of space.
Likewise, if matter just moves by itself, it should also be able to go at any speed, but special relativity requires it to always go slower than light, and common sense can’t explain why. Relativity also makes the speed of light constant however matter moves, so light from a rocket moving at half the speed of light still leaves it at the speed of light, which again makes no sense. Light then moves absolutely while matter moves relatively, but why?
QR5.3.1. Matter Teleports
QR5.3.2. Matter Moves Space
QR5.3.3. Kinetic Energy And Photons
QR5.3.4. Bit-shifting Reality
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 5.4), 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 5.2). 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 5.3). 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.
