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Word Gems
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Quantum Mechanics
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Virtual Reality: What if all of physical reality, including space and time, not just energy and matter, is quantized?
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In 1900 Max Planck speculated that energy – the photon – is quantized. This concept was confirmed by Albert Einstein in 1905.
Niels Bohr’s atomic model of 1913 asserted that electrons, when they move from a higher to lower orbit, do not pass through intervening space. But what if this quality of “immediately appearing in a lower orbit” is led by “there is no intervening space” as such if the particles are merely representations of particles, like pixels on a screen? Pixels on a screen are created by an underlying mathematical algorithm and do not move through “intervening space” because, for them, there is no intervening space.
Some scientific minds have looked at these examples and have asked the question, “What if it’s not just energy and matter that’s quantized, but what if everything is quantized, including space and time?”
What if everything, all the universe, is granulated, not smooth? - pixelated?
from https://physicsworld.com/a/paul-dirac-the-purest-soul-in-physics/
... evidence from the light coming out of atoms seemed to indicate that some quantities that in classical mechanics can take any values are actually restricted to a set of particular values: they are “quantized”.
One of these quantities is the energy of the electrons in an atom. This was strange and shocking. Imagine being told that when your car accelerates from 0 to 70 miles per hour it does so in a series of jumps from one speed to another (say in steps of one thousandth of a mph), with the intermediate speeds simply not existing. It did not make sense, and yet observations seemed to demand such an interpretation...
Dirac applied quantum mechanics to the way light and matter interact. This made him realize that it was necessary to quantize not only particles but the electromagnetic field itself, and led him to the first consistent theory of photons (which had been discovered several decades previously in the beginnings of quantum mechanics). This led to the elaborate and thriving quantum field theories of today.
The following writings explore this idea.
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