Quantum Context
Most of us think of quantum as the smallest of the small, or perhaps as the basis of everything and yet with a physics quite unlike everything else that exists on a larger scale.
I think there is a greatly under-appreciated aspect of the quantum level and this is — the speed at which everything is moving.
The most elementary particles (ones that do not break down into smaller particles) that are at the basis of the quantum realm (and the Standard Model) are moving at the speed of light¹ , or far closer to it than nearly every other physical thing in the universe.
This hyper-motion, and the fact that these particles have far less mass than one would first expect ², are crucial to understanding things on the quantum level and how quantum, Newtonian and relativity all fit together.³
I have a theory, but it doesn’t start with this quantum motion, it ends up there.
For me, these intense speeds and lack of mass are a confirmation of the theory and that it’s headed in the right direction.
To get to this theory, only one of the basic assumptions of physics needs to change and when it is changed many other things move, shift and then drop into place.
The thing that needs to change is something that’s quite central, something that science relies heavily on but can’t actually find or explain.⁴
It’s time.
What needs to shift is to see that time isn’t time, it’s simply timing.
Exploration of Time
It was an exploration of time that got this theory started.
Theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall, answered a question in a podcast with “I would just say nobody understands time.”⁵
And I was surprised! I thought science knew what time was — the fourth dimension, space-time and all that (even if it didn’t quite make sense to me).
If science really didn’t understand what time was, then this freed me up to say “Well, what do I think it is?”
The breakthrough came with a thought experiment where I tried to find the fourth dimension⁶ (which is what time is thought to be).
Seeing the first three dimensions is nice and straight forward: 1st, 2nd and 3rd taking us from line, to square, to cube.
Ok a cube, but then what?
In my imagination I looked every which way; I couldn’t find any 4th dimension.
But then I had an intuition where I imagined reaching in and twirling the cube.
I hadn’t realized this before, but my three dimensional cube was stationary, it had no motion at all.
Through science we can see that everything is in motion.⁷
From subatomic particles and molecules, to planets and galaxies,
we cannot find any physical thing in the universe that is not in motion.
In other words, the 4th dimension is not another stationary direction;
rather it is the movement of (or within) the three dimensions.
This is something we can see, this is something actual.
It may seem too ordinary, but the 4th dimension (if we want to call it that) is not time, it’s motion.
We may think that time is how everything changes, but it’s actually everything being in motion and interacting that is making these changes happen.
Some changes come before other changes, this is simply timing.
Let’s take a closer look, if we were to make a list of every single cause and effect that has aged an old wooden fence post: freezing-thawing, UV from sunlight, microorganisms, oxidation, etc., etc., etc. and put them in the order that they happened, we would have a very, very long list.
You may be surprised to find that time is not on this list, that it has no cause or effect. In a way what we call “time” is the list, or the layering, or sequential order in which everything is changing.
In other words, “time” is the timing between things that are in motion and changing as they are compared with other things that are also in motion and changing.
If we try to boil all this change down to one thing, we find motion not time.
Can I convince you that there’s no such thing as time? I doubt it very much.
The sense of time is so ingrained in us.
Firstly, it is difficult to engage our brains without using memory.
Memory is of the past (and can then be used to extrapolate the future).
This past-future perspective invariably gives us a sense of time.⁸
Simply put, when we think, we see time.
And, ever since we started as single cell organisms, day in and day out, season after season, for as long as there has been life on this planet, we’ve evolved under the constant influence of the reliable, steady motions of the earth, moon and sun.
We use these constant, steady motions to time the many, many other less steady motions.
A sense of time is embedded in our DNA, our psyches and our language. Time is the most used noun in the English language⁹.
There’s no removing this sense of time.
Just to be clear, all the things we attribute to time: aging, one moment changing to another, etc. are still in full effect, it’s just that they are not actually due to time, rather to the vast number of things that are in motion, interacting and changing.
And because many of these things have been so invisible, their motions and effects appear rather mysterious to us.
The Bigger Picture
What was it that sparked my intuition to put the cube in motion?
If I take a step back and look around, it’s easy enough to see.
I’m actually far more interested in who and what we are as human beings than I am in the physics of the cosmos.
For over a decade I’ve been exploring how the brain works through memory and conceptualization.
In my wanderings, I’d bumped into several consistent tendencies when comparing a concept of something to the source (or origin, of what is being conceptualized).
1) Concepts usually come across as bigger or more important than the source.
2) Concepts often have an addictive quality to them.
3) And for things that are not actually things (such as: happenings, events, feelings, thoughts, etc.) once they are stored into memory as concepts, they end up coming across much more like things or nouns.
Is time a concept?
Do we see time as important? That’s a big yes!
Is there an addictive quality to time, with everyone scurrying around looking at their watches? I think we can check off that box.
And, does time seem like a thing where there is no thing? Yes, unless or until science can find that thing, absolutely yes.
I think all this helped me take time less seriously, as only a concept, and to be more open to seeing what the concept was based on.
Mass-Space-Motion
S o the question that I interested me was, what happens if we replace time with motion?
One of the things that would change involves relativity, the unit that we call space-time⁶ would become space-motion instead.
Ok, so what would that be? Space swirling around, or… ?
What quickly became apparent when describing motion in the universe was, we need space but we also need mass. We need mass moving through space to be specific.
So we need mass and space and motion.
And that’s it. That’s the theory! That mass-space-motion make up a central intrinsic unit.
Pretty simple, once we get this thing about time straightened out.
Mass-space-motion, inseparable in every physical thing in the universe.
So how do mass, space and motion work together?
What relationship do they have with each other?
One place where we can start to see what’s going on is in black holes.
Black Holes and Mass Imbalance
Black holes have an immense amount of mass (and gravity), almost no space, and motion that is so limited that even light cannot escape.¹⁰
To me, it was looking like large amounts of mass were creating a situation where there was less space and less motion.
We could call this a kind of imbalance of too much mass, resulting in not enough space and not enough motion.
I wondered if mass-space-motion could get imbalanced in other ways, such as a space imbalance or a motion imbalance.
For instance, would a motion imbalance have lots of motion resulting in very little mass and almost no space?
Motion Imbalance
What has lots of motion, very little mass and very little space?
My first guess seemed like quite a stretch but . . . what about the quantum level? Where things are tiny and mass appears to be less mass like.¹¹-¹²-¹⁴-²⁴-²⁷
Some people talk about quantum as if it has lots of space, others as if it has only the smallest amounts of space.¹²
I don’t know, but interestingly, quantum entanglement¹³ makes a lot more sense if there’s a point of no space that comes in to play.
Quantum space and mass are said to have virtual particles that are popping in and out of existence, perhaps this is a popping in and out of a background of no space at all.¹⁴
It is hard to observe almost no mass, even harder to study almost no space.
But once I found out that all the subatomic particles that make up an atom are going close to the speed of light, and that they also have 99% less mass than this (slower moving) atom, seeing quantum as a motion imbalance was starting to make a lot of sense.
If quantum is indeed a motion imbalance, then the bridge between the quantum and Newtonian levels is the molecular level, where everything is in motion but slower (and with more mass).¹⁵
Quantum is often considered to be the most fundamental way of seeing how things are in our universe.
However, as a motion imbalance, quantum looks more like a side tangent (a kind of odd side tangent that is everywhere and yet maybe right on the edge of nowhere at all) where standard physics goes bonkers, just as much as it does inside a black hole.¹⁶
In other words, where mass-space-motion are in balance Newtonian physics applies and when there’s any strong imbalance, things get wonky and the physics gets strange.¹⁷-³
Space Imbalance
The third kind of imbalance would be a space imbalance.
So what would this be? Lots and lots of space where there’s very little mass and almost no motion.
Where would we find this space imbalance?
One place is in the newest findings of “Cosmic Voids”¹⁸ or giant space bubbles that are sprinkled throughout our universe. So far there are over 6,000 of these detected with the largest ones measuring hundreds of millions of light years across.
Apparently, the structure of our universe looks more like a hunk of Swiss cheese.
Just as there are mass imbalances (black holes, etc.) throughout the universe, there are also space imbalances (Cosmic Voids) as well.
And the inherent motion of space (expansion, which I’ll explain more about later) is accentuated in the largest of these Voids.¹⁸
This was very encouraging news because it was another confirmation of the theory’s description of the inherent motion of space (as the opposite inherent motion of mass).
In an effort to make things more bit sized I’ve made this part one of
Quantum Context.
Quantum Context part II, is where the references (¹ through³²) are.
It gets a little denser as it gets into how the theory fits with relativity.
It also details what the inherent motions of space and mass are and removes the need for the creation of “dark energy”.
The reading length of part two is about the same as this, except for the references (with excerpts) which take up about 2/3rds of the document.
