Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Is time quantized?

Being, at heart, a self-confessed crackpot, I suppose I am naturally drawn towards the more iconoclastic ideas.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-time-quantized-in-othe/

Baez and Unruh present the level-headed answers, but the fascinating one comes from Tifft who reaches the conclusion that:

"Believe it or not, it seems that we can have it both ways--the underlying structure of time can be 3-D and quantized, but structures in time can flow continuously."

Never mind the "sensible" guys; let's have some comments on Tifft's ideas.

NOTHING? SOMETHING? EVERYTHING?
==================================
Bill, you always add: "There never was nothing".

Does this mean you believe there always was something?

Grist for the mill of philosophy, eh! Then along came the scientists and the artists!

I checked on Wikipedia. According to their article subsequent investigations have not been able to substantiate Tifft's findings. The general consensus seems to be that his observations can be explained by other effects.

As far as whether time is quantized. My opinion is tentatively in favor of quantization. This is based largely on the fact that everything else seems to be quantized, so it would make sense for time to also be quantized.

Bill Gill

It's old speculative junk, Bill. Don't waste your time on it. Time is merely a cumulative measure of local motion. A clock doesn't literally measure the flow of time. It isn't some gas-meter gizmo with time flowing through it instead of methane. If it's a pendulum clock, it counts the swings of a pendulum. If it's a quartz wristwatch, it counts the vibrations of a crystal. If it's an atomic clock, it counts microwaves resulting from hyperfine spin flips. There's always something moving, and some kind of accumulation, and some kind of cumulative display that shows "the time".

As for time being quantized, does a photon approach you in steps? No. There is no magic microscopic flicking from A to B without going through all points between. The photon is a wave, and it approaches you smoothly. And time is a measure of motion so if motion isn't quantized rime isn't either. I'm surprised Baez let himself be associated with such nonsense. But there again it does date back to 1999.

I hesitate to use the word “believe” as that might be taken to indicate that it is something I accept as a matter of faith. In fact I have spent a lot of years thinking about it, and I find the logic inescapable. There is a lot of fuzzy thinking about nothing, and even more about infinity. Mathematicians can do very clever things with infinity, but it is easy to become bemired in the mathematics and lose sight of the fact that there is more to infinity.

Orac has pointed out that science doesn’t care what we think about these things; and undoubtedly he has a point. However, we still have to ask what one means by “science doesn’t care”. Science doesn’t think; so what we are really saying is “scientists don’t care….”. This must be tantamount to saying that scientists will permit scientific thought to progress only via a chosen group.

Many scientists agree that infinity is not a number, but do they necessarily feed consistent information to non-scientists. Only today, I found this quote in an advertisement for New Scientist:

“To many it might seem that infinity is just one of those things with a preprogrammed boggle factor, like a glorified Sudoku puzzle. But you may be surprised to find out what mathematicians are doing with that very big number.”

Well, the photon is a wave, or it is a particle. (I know, that is an extreme simplification.) But the photon is quantized. So I see no reason that time (and space) shouldn't be quantized also. If time is quantized then the quantum of time is so short that we can't see it. After all movies and TV are quantized and we don't see the gaps between frames. However, I really don't know whether time is quantized. That is just my feeling that things should be pretty much the same for the whole universe.

And then there was a quote I saw somewhere that QM is a field theory, so it is inherently analog, not digitized.

Bill Gill

For once I will give a specific answer and then the question you need to answer

The specific answer I will give you is that the only interactions quantized in physics are by quantum mechanics there exists no other mechanism or theory allows for it.

So now the question asked becomes a much simpler one. As I have said before sometimes thinking about the question is more interesting than the answer

Rephrase of question: Is time a fundemental property of QM or does it sit outside QM?

Hint: Is there any symmetry of Nature that would allow you to slow processes down by a factor k and expect that the process would continue unchanged but slower (think specifically of microscopic effects). Can time be considered real within that framework then? Bill G got very close with his response above.

This appears to assign a causative role to QM; Is that intentional?

Would it not be more accurate to consider that interactions in nature are either quantized, or not; and that QM is the only means by which we are, currently, able to make a distinction?

It is intentional if you give one of the answers because it would have to be that way. So within the current framework of science the question is only answerable within the field QM and anyone who doesn't realize that fact hasn't got a clue and you may discount there opinion.

QM makes a very definitive answer to the question which has a mountain of a problem for anyone to get over within the field and I encourage you to read more because the answer was first calculated by Max Planck 100 years ago.

Hint (shamelessly stolen from Lumo): Look at radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of an atom which is always equal to specific time you can't construct any "mutation of the atom" in which the time would be different. Nor can you shrink or grow the size of the atom, an atom twice as large with the fundemental properties twice as much does not exist. There is only one specific size and time that exists for these things and QFT is simply a formalization of that fact. So can the things called time,size etc be fundemental to QM/QFT? There are exactly two options (a) and (b) and Bill G has given you one of the possibilities and the other option is a bit more abstract (pun intended).

Your second part in the reply above makes another possibility case that there exists another theory that allows quantization and now all you need to do is rewrite all physics before I can make an assessment of the idea. I can't discount the idea but I also can't currently assess it, it becomes much like trying to assess a religion and god

This may tell you a lot about the atom, or the radiation, but it tells you nothing about time, other than that it is that by which you do the measuring. Given that any quantum of time were sufficiently small, the measurement would be unaffected.



Given that you distinguish appropriately between "fundamental" and "essential", the answer probably "no".

Sigh .. think carefully and read about atomic orbitals. What are the components of momentum Bill S? Radioactive decay half life are measure in what Bill S? I am curious how you are going to separate these from time it's going to make some interesting physics

Can I suggest you start with a google of "can you change the half life decay of a radioactive substance" which will lead you thru some interesting answers to start with.

hint link: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30308/changing-the-half-life-of-radioactive-substances


There are huge differences please do some reading on what makes a something fundemental in a physics sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction

Science defines it's terms tightly unlike layman.

As so often happens, we seem to be wandering into complications that are only tangentially linked to the OP.

Is this too facile?


http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35674/is-time-continuous-or-discrete

"As we cannot resolve arbitrarily small time intervals, what is ''really'' the case cannot be decided.
But in classical and quantum mechanics (i.e., in most of physics), time is treated as continuous.
Physics would become very awkward if expressed in terms of a discrete time."



As in the case of "nothing"?

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/30308/changing-the-half-life-of-radioactive-substances

Interesting link.

“The simple answer is no, we can't change the half life.”

“Short answer: yes, the decay rates could be changed considerably by environment”


Highlights the exactitude of scientific responses; or something like that.

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/10/18/is-time-real/

This does drift away from the OP, somewhat, but it is an interesting, related, video.