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33 comments
  • a tragic tale, he missed his dead cat and thought science would bring it back to life but all einstein could do was give him a zombie cat. let this be a warning to us all.

  • Heck, I love explaining quantum physics.

    Ask me questions! I can dumb it down enough that even a child can understand!

    • Do time and space realy change places if you go past the event horizon of a black hole? How does that work?

      Maybe not the right field of knowledge, but i heard this recently and haven't come along anybody able to dumb it down enoth for me to understand. So I thought I might ask anyway :-)

      • As far as we can figure it, basically, yeah. Wrapping your brain around the concept is less tricky than you'd think.

        So gravity gets stronger the closer you are to a black hole, but at the event horizon things get weird. The extreme curvature of spacetime forces space itself to flow toward the singularity at its center faster than the speed of light, so on the inside there's no "other" direction to point to, even photons emitted straight "out" can't reach the event horizon and end up moving in the same direction as everything else. So space becomes timelike, proceeding inexorably from point A to B.

        Time is more complicated, because it's really hard to visualize. If you fall into a black hole, you'll pass through all the outward-pointing light that's been failing to escape since the event horizon formed, which makes all the past history of the black hole visible below you. Meanwhile, anything that falls into the black hole after you can be seen falling from above as the downward-pointing photons catch up. The timeline of the inside of the black hole is laid out with the past and future being directions you can point to, making time spacelike.

    • Please explain entanglement and how two particles can be inexplicably connected despite being gajillions of light years apart! Bonus question, do you believe time exists?

      • Okay!

        Entanglement is what we call any sort of quantum interaction that causes some property of two particles to become linked, like photon gun that always spits out two photons of the same polarization, or bouncing a couple of molecules together so that they spin in opposite directions. So long as nothing comes along to disrupt that state, we could measure one particle and we'd know the state of the other particle no matter where it is without having to measure it. So a couple of intergalactic hydrogen atoms could exchange a photon across light years and become entangled for the rest of time, casually sharing some quantum of secrets as they coast to infinity.

        The "inexplicable connection" there is just information about a quantum pair, but it's spooky because that information literally doesn't exist until it is measured. Schrodinger's cat isn't "either dead or alive but we don't know which until we check", the entangled possibilities are both equally real and can interfere with themselves like the electrons in the double slit experiment.

        Bonus answer, I think time is real but isn't like what we imagine it to be.

33 comments