In our theory of EEQT we start with a fundamental and simple fact that material things (like chairs) exist, and that events happen (for instance a chair breaks). Any theory that does not have a place for these simple data will not be able to account for what happens. It will have to, for instance, imply that these things happen only in our minds, and then resign, because our minds do not belong to physics. That is what many of the so called “quantum philosophers” say. It’s a load of nonsense.
Quantum Fluctuations
One of the speculations made by theoretical physicists is that the “space-time metric fluctuates”. Time somehow becomes space, space somehow becomes time – in a way that is still speculative within the context of the orthodox quantum theory.
Alexsander K. Guts, a Russian physicist and mathematician from the State University of Omsk wrote an entire book entitled “Elements of the Theory of Time”1, where he discusses, in particular, possible scenarios of four and five-dimensional space vs. time fluctuations. According to him (and his collaborator, Marina S. Shapovalova2) the idea goes back to John Archibald Wheeler in 1960-1970, then followed by the famous Russian physicists, A. D. Sakharov, and an Italian iconoclast physicist G. Modanese. Modanese also became famous for his work on “antigravity”. According to the English Wikipedia:
Giovanni Modanese is a professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.
He is the author of several publications in General Relativity and Quantum Gravity. He collaborated with Eugene Podkletnov, devising a device that reportedly generates a "repulsive" gravity-like beam that is several orders of magnitude stronger than the aforementioned experiments. This work has been published in a peer-reviewed journal but has not yet been confirmed by others. (Italics, mine.)
Evidently there is something dangerous about these ideas; not all is revealed to the public, probably because the military are interested in this kind of work. But from my private correspondence with Modanese I know that he is quite serious.
Bu no one has yet addressed the fundamental problem of “what are quantum fluctuations?”
Many physicists are using this term – “quantum fluctuations” - in a misleading way, in a way that suggests that quantum theory can explain “fluctuations”, while instead of explaining it, a rather involved mathematical apparatus is being proposed that actually only serves to hide the real problem. Nothing can really “fluctuate” except in a theory that describes “quantum jumps”, and this is still a speculative idea, except, I would say, in EEQT, where it is described as a real process that can be simulated even on a personal computer.
Here I will illustrate quantum fluctuations with a simple toy model that involves six Schrödinger’s cats that are continuously monitoring the simplest possible quantum system, so called “spin ½”. Quantum states of such a system (so called “pure states”) can be represented as points of the surface of an ordinary sphere. Each point on the sphere represents a direction of the spin (of an electron, for example). I have chosen six points on this sphere, points located at the vertices of two pyramids joined at their bases. These vertices form a regular octahedron – one of the five Platonic solids. At each vertex I put one of Schrödinger’s cat that monitors the direction of the spin, whether it points in his direction or not.
If the direction of the spin points in the direction of the cat – the cat dies. But, because I adore cats, my cats are immortal. Right after their deaths they get resurrected and start watching again. When a given cat dies, quantum state jumps – usually in the direction of the cat that got hit by the spin. Since the other cats are observing as well, we have a sequence of jumps. Each time when the quantum state jumps I note the new position of the direction of the spin state by a white point on a black sphere of quantum states. The jumps are random, according to a particular algorithm proposed by EEQT. And yet, after ten million random jumps, simulated on a PC, a strange (and not fully understood yet) fractal pattern appears.
Two things are “fluctuating” here. First there are cats that repeatedly get killed and resurrected, but I am not interested in their reincarnation histories here. I am interested in the fluctuating state of the quantum system – the pattern drawn on the invisible “quantum sphere”. The Russian physicist from Omsk, Guts, also has an idea of fractality that may be important for space and time fluctuations. In EEQT, in this example with six cats, one of the well known quantum dogmas is being questioned, since according to the textbook quantum theory my arrangement of cats is not allowed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. But Heisenberg was not God, and a textbook should not be considered as a Holy Bible. To have some fun I published my paper in the Chinese Journal of Physics,
1Aleksandr Guc), “Elementy teorii vremeni”, Art&fakt jelektronnyj al'manah Omsk: Nasledie. Dialog-Sibir', 2004 (in Russian)
2Alexander K. Guts, Marina S. Shapovalova, “Large fluctuations of time and change of space-time signature”.
