shawnhcorey

The event is when you put the electron in a superposition of spin up and spin down. The superposition of state is a sphere that expands at the speed of light. When a quantum event happens, you don't know what it is until it is measured. It is only when it's measured does the superposition collapses and you know what occurred. All superpositions expand at the speed of light, so a measure of the distance between the event and the measure defines time.

Its meaning is implied by its usage, the same as any other word. From Wikipedia's Quantum Superposition page: Quantum superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics. It holds that a physical system (say, an electron) exists partly in all its particular, theoretically possible states (or, configuration of its properties) simultaneously; but, when measured, it gives a result corresponding to only one of the possible configurations (as described in interpretation of quantum mechanics). It is the distance between the event and where it is measured. Since the superposition travels at the speed of light, it is also the time.

People think it's real. Their belief is persistent.

Time is a mathematical illusion. Like all mathematical illusions, it is both consistent and persistent. What is is it the distance travelled by the superposition of a quantum event until it collapses.

No. When a quantum encounters the two slits, it becomes two superposition, entangled quanta which interfere with each others probability of travel. It's this interference pattern that gives you the classical wave interfere pattern. When one of them hits a detector, the superposition collapses causing the other to disappear. Nothing goes back in time. This is from the quantum superposition page of Wikipedia: Quantum superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics. It holds that a physical system (say, an electron) exists partly in all its particular, theoretically possible states (or, configuration of its properties) simultaneously; but, when measured, it gives a result corresponding to only one of the possible configurations (as described in interpretation of quantum mechanics). This creates a quantum arrow of time since the superposition cannot be recreate and then made to shrink back to a point.

Part of the problem is that physicists have only studied high-energy particle physics and have left the wave properties of quanta at the high-school level. Nobody is studying high-energy wave physics. They set up their experiments to use quanta as particles, measure quanta as particles and think of quanta as only particles that sometimes have weird wave-like side-effects if you're not careful to filter them out of your experiment. When you start thinking of quanta as having particle and wave properties at the same time, the weirdness goes away.

Somewhat related is how a light cone changes as it nears an event horizon (see image). Of course, if it changes with greater gravity, it should also change with lesser gravity (see image). The difference between the two is that the first has the light cone collapsing and the second has it rotating. In either case, when you look at the light cone very far away, the nearest light ray as rotated to the point where it is point straight up, meaning it can no longer reach us, ever. And it's this rotation that causes the red-shift of light.

I thought those were called water wheels.

That's what I said, the less hairy would stick with it. That means, of course, that they were less hairy to start with; something else cause they to evolve the reduction of hair.

I think this is unlikely. That our hairy ancestors played around with something as hazardous as fire until their descendants could evolved a means to reduce the hazards seems unlikely. It's more likely they would stop the first time they were burnt and their descendants would never need to get less hairy. In other words, our ancestors were pretty much hairless when they started using fire.

Or it was cause by sexual selection rather than natural selection. That is, our ancestors thought lack of fur indicated a better mate. The question becomes why would that be?

Evolution does not have a will of its own and it's not intelligent. Evolution is a process and that which survives does so because of its abilities and is not the will of something else.

The problem is that no-one knows what those challenges were. The other problem is that things people read in high-school textbooks are taken as absolute truths. For example: we lost our fur so that we can sweat better. There is no evidence that this is true; it's all conjecture. Questions like "Why did we have to sweat so much?" "Where did this occur?" "When in the evolution of our ancestors did this happen?" None of them have answers.

Three simple steps: practice, practice, practice. (It works with most other endeavours too. )

Does anyone have any references to this? I'm asking because it seems to me that when our ancestors' hair started to thin out, they had to start carrying their babies. Their hair was too thin for the babies to grip onto. I'm curious because of an article I read on big babies shaping society where they state that no-one seems to know when our babies started to get big. It seems to me that they could get big if they were relying on their own strength to hold on to their mothers. So when our ancestors hair started to thin out, they had to carry their babies and the barrier to big babies was gone. So I was wondering how far back in time this might be.

From Wikipedia: The Planck length can be defined from three fundamental physical constants: the speed of light in a vacuum, Planck's constant, and the gravitational constant. The red shift shows that the distance from distance galaxies is increasing as compared to the fundamental physical constants. If Planck length changes, the at least one of the above must change. If it changes in proportion to the expansion of the universe, then the physical constants would change and there would be no detectable change in distance. Everything would balance out. Hence, there would be no red shift.

IMO, there is no need for a multiverse. When two (or more) different outcomes are possible, a superposition is created within our universe, which gets resolved at some future time.

Although speculating on time travel is always fun, it does not seem likely. First, no-one has ever sent anything back in time, not even the small bit. Second, all the equations of physics are symmetrical; they are the same regardless of if you run the forward or backward. Since physics cannot distinguish between the future and the past, the time parameter in all its equations is nothing but a mathematical convenience. Time has no dimension. You can't go back into the past because there's no there to go to. There also seems to be some confusion between general and special relativity. General relativity says that clocks deep in a gravitational well will run faster than those far away. Special relativity says that clocks travelling at high speed will run slower than those moving slower or not at all.

I always thought quantum teleportation involved two entangled quanta and two photons. With it, you could "teleport" the properties of one photon to the other instantaneously. None of the quanta, however, move faster than light, just the properties of one photon.

If Planck length expanded too, everything would be expanding at the same rate and it would be impossible to determine if there was any expansion at all. In order for us to see the universe expand, we need something that doesn't expand to compare it to. If everything expanded at the same rate, all comparisons would indicate there there was no change, and hence, no expansion. Of course, the other way to look at it is that the universe is of fixed size and Planck length is shrinking.

I've just signed up. I have a B.Sc. in Math and work programming computers. My interests are in the afore as well as physics and human evolution.