This Model Explains WHY Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle Happens | Theory of Everything Part 2

A unified

theory

of

everything

has a monumental task on its hands. It must bring together the strangest elements of quantum mechanics and relativity: the rules at the macro and micro scale. Which is really hard to do because there are some very strange things happening in the quantum world. Uncertainty. How many. Overlays. So let's start there. After my last video on

this

topic, I received many different comments from all of you, eager to hear my opinion on the answer to

everything

. Last time I stated that I believed that some form of string

theory

offered the best chance of achieving a unified theory of everything.

It's time to show you how much heavy ropes can lift on the quantum scale. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. While I don't claim to have worked out the mathematics of the theory, I think I've come up with a

model

that ties all the phenomena together. The mathematics of quantum physics has rapidly surpassed our understanding of why the things we observe happen. Let's try to help conceptual understanding catch up. As I said in my last video, it all starts with strings. Let's analyze some properties of a vibrating string. This will help us see why they lend themselves to quantum

principle

s.

We need to start with that first word; quantum. In short, how much is derived from the same root as the word quantity. It is the strange

principle

that, on a small enough scale, the universe appears to operate in discrete quantities rather than operating on a continuous scale. This is a bit unintuitive, like many things in quantum mechanics, so we'll illustrate what we mean with an example. If you're running, I might ask you to go half the speed you're running. You could slow down again and again. Is there a limit to how many times you can slow down?

While you may struggle with the precision needed to do

this

, in classical physics there is no reason why you couldn't keep halving and halving your speed infinitely, since there is no limit to the number of times that you can divide a number by 2. There is always a smaller number. In the quantum world this is not the case. When it comes to energy levels, momentum, and other attributes, when you reach a small enough number, you discover that the universe does not operate on a continuous scale, but in discrete quantities. An electron in a hydrogen atom can have exactly -13.6 eV energy, or it can have -3.4 eV, but under no circumstances can it have an energy level between those values.

This has been proven experimentally. A theory of everything must make use of an underlying universal geometry that is fundamentally quantized. The concept of some kind of string network fits well,

part

icularly when transverse standing waves and harmonics are introduced. By plucking a guitar string, a standing wave can be formed that has one or two peaks, but no intermediate value. This is because harmonics are formed by the combination of waves traveling along the string in one direction and perfectly resonating with waves traveling in the other. If the speed or frequency of the waves do not align perfectly, the two waves will eventually interrupt each other, causing the standing wave to collapse.

Only waves with just the right amount of speed and energy can create standing waves on a given string. So immediately we have an interesting mirror of our observation that subatomic

part

icles have quantized momenta and energy levels. The same thing

happens

with standing waves in strings. The next interesting point to note about waves is that by combining the right sequence of sine waves, you can create any wave pattern you want, which is useful for creating the rich complexity of a universe. This mathematical principle was first discovered by Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician, and is very useful in the study of heat transfer and vibrations, as it also works the other way around: any wave can be decomposed into several waves. constituent sinusoidal. .

When two waves try to occupy the same place, they will amplify each other if they both rise or fall, but they will cancel each other out if they are in opposition. This can cause all kinds of waves to form: square waves, intermittent waves, and even waves that only have one peak and are flat everywhere else. This becomes easier to do the more waves you have to layer. This is an interesting observation, as it helps answer an important question that any theory of everything must be able to answer: where do particles come from? When I say particles, I do not specifically mean molecules or atoms, but rather the components that make up these objects.

Atoms are divided into protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and neutrons split into quarks, and there are also leptons and bosons. Without needing to go into what exactly all these things are, or why they have some of the strange names they do (who decided to call a quark “strange”, “charm”, or “background”?), it is enough to say that they come in many different flavors. These are the smallest components of reality that we know so far. Because they exist? Well, in a

model

that uses ropes, they are the rise and fall of a wave. This coincides with Einstein's observation that mass and energy were essentially the same thing in different forms, as stated in his equation e = mc2.

A wave is the movement of energy. The mass can also be that. The narrower the peak of the wave, the more defined a particle is in terms of its location on that chord. You might disagree with the idea that both waves represent the location of a single particle. However, interestingly, this coincides with another important facet of particles: they are sometimes a bit vague about exactly where they are in space. If you know much about quantum mechanics, you've probably heard of the Heisenberg

uncertainty

principle. This is the idea that we cannot know the momentum and position of a particle at the same time.

We can get a decent approximation at large scales (it's easy to see where you are and where you're going), but at small enough levels this becomes impossible to do. The more precisely we know where a photon is, the less information we will have about its momentum. And vice versa. This is not just because we have poor techniques for observing them, but it is apparently a fundamental truth. However, if we think that particles are the sum of many superimposed waves, this suddenly makes a lot more sense. Check out this wave. It is perfectly defined in terms of where it is going, but if we consider that the peaks of this wave represent the location of the subatomic particle – or at least, the possibility that the particle is at this location – there are many places it can be.

So for this given string, we have perfect knowledge of its speed and direction, but we are not sure of its position in a given string space. Perfectly in line with Heisenberg's

uncertainty

principle. If we converge several different waves at a single point, we can take advantage of Fourier's mathematical trick to cancel out some of the peaks of our wave. The more waves we add coming from different directions, the more defined our particle will be in space... but look at our particle now. How many ropes run through it? Each of them is a separate vector line that represents momentum in a different direction.

It is no longer so possible to specify where this particle will go next, since there are several options that could be true. To perfectly localize a particle in terms of its location would require vector lines that could lead anywhere. This is starting to get into territory where information from the entire universe is needed before a single particle can be truly “resolved” in terms of its location in space and time, which causes a bit of pain. head. Maybe the universe settles for close approximations most of the time, until someone takes a closer look. For this model, we must discard our concept of a particle as a localized object, but instead define it as the convergence of different waves, which come together at a single point and then diverge again.

This divergence does not seem correct to us. We are uncomfortable with the idea that our particles are only really there at one time and then dissipate. However, those of you who are familiar with the double slit experiment (which I covered in a previous video) will recognize that it is a strange coincidence with another strange experimental result: a single photon released from an emitter and passing through two slits somehow passes through both slits, interfering with itself as it travels. The photon again arrives at the far detector as a single particle, indicating a new convergence at that point, but by sending many photons along this path it is clear that interference is occurring in the intervening space.

The photon appears to leave as a particle and arrive as a particle, but in the space between it acquires the properties of a wave that propagates and undulates. We're already starting to see how some of the strangest aspects of the quantum world fit with the idea of ​​strings carrying waves of energy. But this is only the first part of my model. To really see how that theory matches the universe around us, we need to explore the motion of particles through time and space. To better understand entanglement and overlaps. And to do so, we need to explore how strings lead to gravity, time dilation, and other principles of relativity on larger scales.

We need to have a clear concept of how time works. My model adapts to that. But we will have to wait until my third video in this series to fully explain it. In the meantime, do you agree with what I've said so far? Are there other aspects of quantum mechanics that you think fit or don't fit the concept of strings? Leave a comment in the description below to let me know. Thanks for watching, and thanks to our team of Astrum-nauts on Patreon, who help us make scientific knowledge freely available to everyone. Chasing the algorithm can sometimes be an unpredictable task, so your contribution helps us continue creating the content we love.

If you also want to know how to contribute, click the link in the description below. When you join, you'll be able to watch the full video ad-free, see your name in the credits, and submit questions to our team. In the meantime, click the link to this playlist for more Astrum content. See you next time.