There and Back Again... A Physicist’s Tale
I am going to explain how gravity is related to the quantum uncertainty principle, but to motivate this explanation, I first need to provide some historical background.
In 300 BC, young Archimedes learned in school that the surface area of a sphere is
. Classical knowledge of atomism, conservation of energy, elliptic conic sections, and heliocentric models became quite advanced until the library of Alexandria burnt in 400 AD and the thousand years of darkness began.
In 1676, at the dawn of the enlightenment, Hooke acquainted us with how a harmonic oscillator works with
and
. Hooke’s contemporary, Newton, built on this and realized in 1687 that the force which causes objects to be heavy,
, is the same force which causes planets to orbit the sun,
In 1865, Heaviside, Faraday, and Maxwell realized that the laws of electricity and magnetism implied that space and time were bent by these forces and that the same would likely be true for gravity. Maxwell also realized that the energy in a substance should be composed of equal parts rotation and vibration. This has become known as equipartition, and this concept connected nicely to Kelvin’s application of Helmohltz’s fluid dynamics equations to describe atoms composed of complexly rotating and vibrating vortices, an idea which gave way to the more empirically simple and verifiable model provided by Rutherford in 1911.
In 1900, Poincare, 1903, de Pretto, 1904 Hasenohrl, and 1905 Einstein wrote
. Heaviside had earlier written
based on empirical grounds while the newer results were based on theoretical grounds. The Italian, de Pretto, realized that mass has intrinsic energy because it is composed of a substance which is moving around at close to the speed of light relative to the surrounding space.
In 1915, Einstein puzzled over what these results meant for gravity with regard to Minkowski’s curved spacetime and Mach’s principle. This was an ironic investigation into the properties of aether from a man who had gained fame a few years earlier by proclaiming that aether couldn’t exist because there was no absolute reference frame. He didn’t know that whereas Michelson-Morely showed that light doesn’t experience aetheric drag, similar experiments with particles show where Lorentz invariance breaks down.
Between 1915 and 1949, the world wars and the atomic bomb shocked and awed the public with the destructive power of science and Einstein somehow became the awkward poster boy for this power. Throughout the wars, science transformed into a dangerous, compartmentalized enterprise which has since been centrally controlled through large laboratories and funding agencies which have steered youthful curiosity towards the very tiny and very abstract (quantum chromodynamics) and the unimaginably distant, powerful, and invisible (black holes) — neither of which have any application in bomb building or in any other discipline. Maintaining a degree of big-picture uncertainty among physicists seemed wise, given the dangers of proliferation.
In 1973, discussions about the temperature of space seen by an accelerated observer on the edge of the event horizon of a black hole produced a description of the Unruh effect,
. If we connect this cosmic insight to the vortex particles of Kelvin from 1865, we automatically have a description of the cause of a particle’s inertia. Despite this rather obvious connection, applying the Unruh effect to the dynamics of fundamental particles never became popular within the physics community. The community was dominated by people who were determined to turn concrete concepts (spin, color, flavor) into inscrutably abstract (and useless) ones.
In 1983, related discussions about the holography and entropy of a black hole led to the realization that one could define the smallest possible length and time scales in terms of fundamental constants and then use them to describe the degrees of freedom contained within a volume,
. Holography was just a complicated way of saying that for vortices large and small, the volume is related to the surface area in a fundamental way. This is something that has been known since the study of objects like Gabriel’s horn in the 1700s.
In 2009, Verlinde pointed out that all of the equations we use are consistent with one another and some people reacted by saying the consistency is obvious and trivial while others said it was new and profound. Such is the mercurial nature of a physicist’s ego.
In any case, when one adds all of these ingredients together and rejects compartmentalized thinking, you end up with a picture of inertia and gravity caused by a substance containing rotational and vibrational motion relative to an absolute reference frame. The inertia of an object is due to the energy required to accelerate a sub-component which is already moving at close to the speed of light and the gravity well with which we are familiar from Laplace and from general relativity is caused by the internal motion or turbulence changing the shape (or properties — if you are a Cartesian) of the surrounding space and time. When particles within an object are vibrating, they don’t exist at one location all of the time and the uncertainty of their position is responsible for the curvature of space and time.
So, while we can see the result of the uncertainty principle written large across the cosmos when Eddington’s star light bends around the sun, we can also see the uncertainty principle in our inability to stop the zitterbewegung of a fundamental particle.
When I compare this formula to the area of a sphere,
, I conclude that Planck’s constant, h, is the area of a sphere with a radius given by the position and momentum of a point in space. To bring this narrative around in a full circle, I wonder if Archimedes’ geometric understanding of atomism was similar — way back in 300 BC.
These guys seem to be making a similar connection in [1311.0763] Gravitomagnetism and Non-commutative Geometry and I tried to express something similar in the language of tired light, but defending the reasoning from those suffering from aphantasia made me… tired and a bit jaded.
In conclusion, climbing the mountain of physics knowledge may seem worthwhile, but the journey will change you and after seeing the view from the peak, you may wish that you had not been so changed.
…………..
If I were to try to tell the same story without mentioning any men, I’d write about Hypatia of Alexandria, Emile du Chatelet, Sophie Germain, Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, Mileva Maric, and Emmy Noether. I should do that. The result would be amusing.
…….
But first, I would like to illustrate the state of modern physics by explaining a subject, starting from well-substantiated statements and ending with wild speculations that many today accept as fact.
…………
“Eureka!” the intellectual ejaculated.
The night sky is black with dots of light.
The light must’ve come from far away things which are moving away from us because otherwise, how did the darkness get there?
If they are moving, then we are probably moving too and if we are all moving in the same general direction, then there must’ve been an origin point for everything and there must’ve been a giant explosion of a cosmic egg and since explosions distribute matter unevenly, the egg must’ve blown up like a balloon before it exploded, and since there seems to be a uniform temperature across the sky, the balloon must’ve blown up faster than the speed of light — at a rate of a light-year within a few seconds.
This is too fun. I have to try another one:
Gravity pulls us down to earth and a fast-moving ball which is pulled by a string will go around in a circle.
There are some lights in the sky which appear to be travelling around the sun in the same way that our planet is, so we are all being pulled towards the sun and the force responsible for this is also gravity.
There are really small units with a length of 1e-35 m which make up everything and they exist in a spin foam which we won’t ever be able to measure, but because of loops of action occurring in the foam, we know this causes gravity because we were able to describe a foam which obeys the same laws that work on larger, planetary scales but which fail on galactic and super-galactic scales.
Something about polymers within Loop quantum gravity — Wikipedia
And yet another:
Big things are made up of little things.
The littlest things which we can measure in a stable configuration can be collided with each other and a bunch of weird, unstable stuff comes out. There are, for example, particles that are produced in pairs of opposites and these pairs of opposites disappear into thin air when they interact with one another. The members of these pairs have never been observed in isolation.
Therefore, we can conclude that the littlest things which we can measure in a stable configuration are composed of the members of these pairs in isolation and the structure of their organization is a form which has never been observed.
Quarks organized according to the Eightfold Way (physics) — Wikipedia
And another:
A model of gravity predicts the existence of invisible things in outer space.
The model predicts that these invisible things will cause visible things to move in certain ways. People claim to have taken photographs of these motions, but the photos are very blurry and one could come up with several explanations for what is observed. These invisible things absolutely exist because our models of gravity are so great, even though they don’t predict the shape of galaxies or the distribution of the galaxies.
We can measure the effect of these invisible things colliding in unimaginably distant star systems by watching how the waves they create cause laser beams to shrink and stretch, even though we tried to see a similar effect in the Michelson-Morely experiment and it didn’t work.
LIGO is basically a giant version of the Michelson–Morley experiment but they say it will give a different result because general relativity and special relativity don’t treat space and time in the same way.
I should stop, but there are just too many of these:
Most of the systems we measure obey the law of conservation of energy. All of the systems obey the law if we are generous with how we define energy.
The smallest things we measure obey the law on average, but there are weird particles which briefly pop into and out of existence and while they exist, they violate the law of conservation of energy. Some of the small things that we measure don’t obey conservation of energy on average, so we need to invent a new particle to make the system obey the law. The particle is so small that no one can measure it.
We can measure this hypothetical particle, even though it is hard to rule out the possibility that the measurements were caused by something else.
If you don’t have a problem with this photo, there isn’t anything I can say to help you. At a certain point, ‘theoretical physicist’ is not a profession, it is a diagnosis.
If you or someone you love is considering studying physics — get help!
