Yet another Hacker News

43 points pella 1 hour ago 29 comments

edgyquant 1 hour ago | parent

I always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

This theory adds more complications than it creates simplifications.

fnordpiglet 13 minutes ago | parent

I’d note that occams razor is a probabilistic statement and not a law.

staplung 1 hour ago | parent

“One electron ought to be enough for everyone.”

netbioserror 1 hour ago | parent

Then wouldn't it be "one-photon"? I've heard (but don't fully understand) that massed particles are simply photons trapped in toroidal vortices, which gives them an outward charge field and lets them interact with the Higgs. Annihilation supposedly just being untangling the toroid.

abeppu 1 hour ago | parent

Even if there were as many positions as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab spontaneously condense into a very low entropy concentrated configuration?

noncovalence 27 minutes ago | parent

_We_ are still traveling forwards in time. If you followed a cloud of antiparticles backwards in time along its direction of travel, then you would see entropy decrease yes, though regular particles would do the same if we followed them back in time.

fnordpiglet 14 minutes ago | parent

The answer is that they don’t literally go backwards in time showing reverse causality. They are representable in QFT by reversing the time component of their counterpart, which doesn’t impact how they interact with broader causality, just their internal configuration. Further - this does not play out in the lab as reversed causality even between anti particles. You can collide two positrons then detect them later at their destinations just fine in normal causality. It’s a shame because it would be really sweet to find some reversal of entropy and causality somewhere or somehow!

Pet_Ant 12 minutes ago | parent

May I introduce you to Maxwell’s Demon?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

diablomablo 54 minutes ago | parent

My thought is that if there's only one electron, then its probabilistic location at a place and a time, should be impacted by its own energy across all places and times. That quantum gravity comes from generalizing the Schrodinger's equation to include these energies in the phase of the wave function, causing the phase to skew and the probability to update towards the location of large mass/energies.

lolakutty 50 minutes ago | parent

Space and time are illusions. So probably true in some sense...There is probably no electron at all...I mean, one would be quite arbitrary, why not two?

gizajob 1 minute ago | parent

Where is the machine you used to type out this comment, and when did you type it?

stared 41 minutes ago | parent

In the line, I recommend „The Egg” by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

amelius 21 minutes ago | parent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

(animated version)

itsalwaysgood 3 minutes ago | parent

That's such a great read.

Asimov's 'The Last Question' is another good one that's in line: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

mvlipwig 40 minutes ago | parent

This might be a result of me not understanding theoretical physics, but this seems "not even wrong." How could you even go about testing this?

zmgsabst 29 minutes ago | parent

We have something like a spinor network in 4D space, where some portions are opposite others in parameters.

Is this a diagram of particles interacting or a single thread weaving through time? Pick your metaphor.

sigmoid10 27 minutes ago | parent

This is yet another case where a layman-written wiki article about physics is highly confusing to other laypeople, because it only tells you half the story. Particularly because it seems to be based on a chapter of Feynman's popular science book. But the book actually goes on and points out how Feynman immediately dismissed Wheeler's hypothesis, because the universe contains a lot more electrons than positrons. You'd have to explain that imbalance first if you want to entertain this line of thought.

torginus 1 minute ago | parent

As a layperson myself - how can we tell that a distant celestial object is not made from antimatter? Afaik, it doesn't behave differently from matter, other than it annihilation on contact.

praxulus 24 minutes ago | parent

Maybe you could disprove it by observing a electron/positron pair being created and then annihilating each other, forming a closed loop that couldn't be part of the single path traced by a single particle.

zmgsabst 13 minutes ago | parent

How would you observe that?

fnordpiglet 19 minutes ago | parent

IANP, but Ive always thought you should be able to observe reverse causality in a positron if true. That’s the primary effect of going backwards in time - a reverse in entropy.

The other side of the theory is the positron hidden in the proton. I assume a particle collider should be able to falsify this.

But it turns out antimatter isn’t supposed to actually move backwards in time but follows the same causality as everything else. It’s just that they represent their matter pairs configuration mathematically by reversing the time orientation. This isn’t super obvious but it’s very much different than going backwards in time literally. Sad!

api 37 minutes ago | parent

Another interesting one is the black hole electron: the electron as a stable micro black hole, possibly super-extremal.

Probably not, but apparently some of the math does work.

There's been some attempts to model all particles as micro black holes or stable quantum scale gravitational objects of some kind.

chasil 30 minutes ago | parent

CP-violation would appear to rule this out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation

The main referenced wiki suggests that the missing positrons are inside protons, but recent a recent LHC experiment asserts CP-violation over baryons.

ck2 16 minutes ago | parent

it's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idea

right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser)

but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk

lioeters 13 minutes ago | parent

A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe.

It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.

gizajob 2 minutes ago | parent

I think some branches of Buddhism derived this too.

krylon 9 minutes ago | parent

Gotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).

tomasphan 5 minutes ago | parent

How does this work with QFT? If an electron is just an excitation in a field then it being “one electron” is meaningless.