The physics community is trying to reconcile Einstein’s relativity theory and quantum mechanical reality. It doesn’t seem to work for gravity for some reason. When a particle like an electron travels through space-time and through a double slit (where it actually looks like it passes through both until we measure it) it is said we can’t say anything about the gravity effects on the electron because ‘gravity is not a quantum theory’. It seems the basic meaning of that is that we have not quantized gravity or found a way to prove gravity is quantized.
I believe we should not consider an electron as traveling through spacetime unless we view it as a distrubance in it, it is not a thing apart from spacetime. The easiest analogy is sound, which is vibrating air, yet we can almost observe it like an object traveling. Vortexes in air and water can travel a long way and transfer their energy over relatively long distances. The trick is that a moving piece of spacetime can separate from the rest, like a moving volume of air and water can too.
I believe that of electrons are vortexes in spacetime, then photons are compression of space time. The reason for that is that every time too much energy ends up trying to disturb a volume of space time that is too small, spacetime starts ejecting photons. It gets compressed and this compression propagates as it tries to uncompress. Intil it hits a patch of spacetime where it can dump its ‘energy’ having been caught in an electromagnetic cage in the mean time. Everything radiates, so spacetime is being moved to other places all the time, in the mean time it does not take up space nor time.
One of the things that amazes me is that if everything is quantized, then why don’t we see the effects of it when we observe the stars. I mean why doesn’t it look like there’s pixels, like an image without anti-aliasing. Do you mean to tell me that light can travel billions of lightyears and never have to adjust to fit a grid of any kind? It seems that way. Spacetime thus can’t be quantized if it is a substrate along which light travels. Yet it is or there would be no limit to the speed of light. The trick is that light has to abide by spacetime’s ‘conduction’ speed and thus it actually creates it. You can understand that if light could travel everywhere instantly there would only be one place for it to go, it would not seem to be spread out and varied etc. There would be no space.
But what if we live in a pixelated space time, would we be able to notice it. If light actually did occupy very fine pixels in our field of view, we would see a slight difference in say the starry night sky by moving a slight distance, but it would be a noticable shift. What if we moved a camera sideways and we’d see stars jumping from one place to another? We don’t, but could we if spacetime was indeed quantized. I don’t think so.
We learn that light travels as a wave. If it comes across a double slit it forms two wave fronts that can interfere. Maybe that is where we can get our answer. At every point in spacetime through which a light wave travels, it emanates a wave front that carries its photon (spacetime) packet forward. If spacetime is pixelated this will be anti-aliassed at every point in spacetime and appear smooth.
The wave properties always smooth out the direction of travel, effectively distributing it and then forcing the energy to progress along the straightest path (unless spacetime is stretched or compressed). Only if we gather enough photons from a certain direction we discover they have the structure of the original planet (a type of heavenly body with constant structure). All the wavefronts can cancel and recombine and basically error correct. But could we prove or disprove whether the light passed though a pixilated screen or medium for example? Not if that screen did not itself take up space (so block light).
I think because photons emerge in spacetime and travel through it you can say it is quantized. The quantum is spacetime compression. More energetic radiation has a higher frequency, and thus more compressed space traveling on it. It is very much like sound, where a total compression of molecules (consuming all energy that gives them their average distance), travels through it until it dissipates (which doesn’t happen with spacetime). Does a high frequency tone at maximum volume allowed by the medium carry more energy? I would say yes. Could it carry more energy? Only if you increase the frequency.
For that reason then also gravity is quantized, but the distributed nature of wave fronts causes all particles we can observe to be anti-aliassed in it as they exist as various convolutions of spacetime. If too much spacetime is ‘tied up’ like that it gets streched, and this causes passing other spacetime ‘knots’ to move into it based on probability. Hence gravity. Its like a sieve with gradually bigger holes on one side. More stuff will pass through that part as you use it.
Quantum mechanics describes the dynamics of the convolutions of spacetime, which can be extemely varied. Spacetime itself I imagine is like an ever evolving graph where nodes appear and disappear due to their desire to appear against a ‘pressure’ of many existing nodes. The ‘spooky action at a distance’ or entanglement wich could have long distance effects at speeds higher than lightspeed can come about because in the creation of the entangled convolutions some edges remain intact. Once one of the two is tested (destroyed) the lost edges allow the other to become the opposite type, as they where created as opposites to begin with but had not been forced to decide. This however could also all be a misinterpretation of observations.
(The problem with wormholes, a concept alluded to above, is that there’s so much internal pressure in the spacetime graph and I don’t yet understand how vertexes connect or find each other. The way to neutralize the forces may be to spin fast, to have homgeneous direction, like laminar flow. We know theres less pressure if water flows faster, because the water molecules are moving sideways less. So total separation of parts of spacetime may be possible, but one would think against massive resistance of the same.)
One can wonder if the ‘stretch’ and ‘compression’ of spacetime is quantized. The problem is that you never get to any fundamental thing unless you become very abstract about it. In short if you imagine a point that wants to split in two points you can have the basis of space time. The splitting creates both space and time. I wrote about this idea before. The ‘desire’ to split and then be two or more space time ‘balls’ or ‘particles’ which can form a medium for waves to propagate through is what drives the expansion of our universe. There is enormous outward pressure from spacetime, but it can be ‘misdirected’ into convolutions that constitute mass and particles which are stabile for a certain period of time. It seems then the exact number of vertexes is quantized, and spacetime’s total volume is, as is its energy potential.
Gravity however may not seem quantized because its effect is a phenomenon in a vast ocean of these edges and vertexes and on top of that smoothed out by all the particles propagating as waves.