loopinfinite

The days have been shorter for nearly a week, and I still haven’t made the adjustment.

I know intellectually that night now falls at about six pm, but I don’t actually see that happen. I never see the light falter, never see the darkness drop.

I look out the window at five and it’s light out, and when I look again an hour later it’s dark. Day flips into night with no intermediary state. Night takes me by surprise like a drive-by shooting. A drive-by nighting, I guess I should say.

What is going on here? Does the twilight exist if I don’t see it?

Maybe between five and six pm, the world outside’s in a weird, unresolved state, half-day and half-night. Call it Schrödinger’s sky. Maybe, by looking out the window, I’m collapsing that sky’s waveform and forcing it to decide what it is.

Maybe between five and six pm, the world outside becomes the key to a theory of everything.

That might be useful. You know, the search for a theory of everything’s the focus of theoretical physics these days.

As I understand it (and I don’t really understand it, so what follows is oversimplified and inaccurate), we’ve got two separate, complete ways of describing the world. We have general relativity and we have quantum mechanics.

I think of relativity as an analog theory, one where space and time are properties of an elastic material that permeates the universe, a fabric that bends and stretches depending on what’s sitting on top of it.

When a star sits on top of that fabric, it makes a big dent. A planet makes a smaller one. Any dent warps space and distorts time, but the bigger the dent, the more the distortion.

I think of quantum mechanics as a digital theory. It doesn’t describe planets or stars. It describes subatomic particles that are impossible to see and difficult to imagine.

The idea is this: when you get down to the level of subatomic particles, the rules that govern larger things no longer apply. Subatomic particles are jittery, jangly things, always vibrating and always moving.

You can’t really know where a particle is. You can calculate how likely it is to be in a certain place at a certain time, but not much more than that.

You can’t observe a particle directly, because the only way you can do that is by bouncing more particles off of it. If you do that, you change what you observe. Every observation, by nature and necessity, becomes invasive.

There are no smooth curves in quantum mechanics. There are only rough edges. General relativity is elegant, but quantum mechanics is chaos.

Quantum mechanics breaks down when you try to apply it to the planets and the stars. General relativity breaks down when you try to apply it to subatomic particles.

Between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we can describe plenty of stuff, but the two theories are fundamentally incompatible. So what people are trying to do is find ways to reconcile them, to stitch them together.

They’re trying to find a theory of everything. Right now, we don’t quite have that. We have two contradictory theories of almost everything.

What blows my mind is, what does this imply? Is there no clean way to pull these theories together?

Does that mean they’re flawed? Does that mean they only happen to describe a few things well by freak coincidence?

Every scientific theory anyone’s ever come up with is rooted in empirical observation. Perhaps empiricism has led us astray.

It’s possible that consistency with reality isn’t enough for a given piece of knowledge to be true. It might be enough for us to design planes and rockets based on that knowledge, but not enough for real truth, if there is such a thing. When you try to work out the details, the math won’t come out right.

Or maybe there’s nothing wrong with our theories, and the problem’s the universe. Maybe it’s incompatible with itself.