Introduction
It is December 15th, 2023, I’m sitting in a cafe in Brooklyn, New York. A family sits across from me, enjoying pastries and drinking coffee: I am here with them in this moment. The seconds continue to move past as I look down at my watch. It was 12:30 when I got here, but now it’s nearly 1. I feel calm; I take a photo to remember the moment. 12:57:29, December 15th, 2023, Brooklyn, New York. I keep that moment with me. Today is January 7th, 2024, and I’m no longer in the cafe. I have a memory and a photograph, but that moment is gone; I can not return because it does not exist. Time flows like a river, they say, but it’s a strange river; I can’t see the water. We all live in this river, yet how often do we stop and question it? How often do we think about the world without ourselves in it? Let me take you to a place where the idea of you has little meaning, where the barrier between the surface of your skin and the rest of the world doesn’t exist. As the seconds tick by on your watch, let’s try to understand what is really happening here. Let me show you just how much there is to understand. And as we learn more about this reality, our learning will begin to bleed into the activities and moments of our lives. Let’s begin to see our reality not as a vast, disconnected world but a deeply interwoven one.
Albert
Our search for time can begin at the start of the 20th century. It is June 30th, 1905, the journal Annalen der Physik publishes a paper by the 25-year-old Albert Einstein. In his papers, Albert attempts to correct contradictions between the equations of Isaac Newton and those of James Clerk Maxwell. This will become a theme where two branches of science lead to contradictions, and the resultis a brilliant formulation of the two. For Einstein, he was troubled by how Newton’s equations stated that the motion of any object is always motion relative to something else; for instance, as you drive 80mph down the highway, that is 80mph relative to the ground below you, and 160mph relative to the drivers going 80mph in the opposite direction. But in 1861, Maxwell began to understand that light traveled at a fundamental velocity, 670,616,629 mph, in all directions, regardless of your frame of reference.
Why was light moving at this speed, relative to what is light traveling at 670 million miles an hour? Light contradicted how Newton understood the world. It is from this contradiction that would lead Einstein to the discovery he would call Special Relativity. The idea is simple, but the implications are complicated. Prior to this, time was thought of as ubiquitous, and present everywhere. Each second that passed on your watch was a second passing across the universe, the whole universe; everything got older together. But Einstein asked, what if time wasn’t consistent? What if time moved at a different speed for different people? The implications of this are extensive, but what we can focus on is that Albert discovered that absolute simultaneity does not exist. There was no collective now among the universe. But there is a here and now, a place and a time where you are reading these words. This glued the ideas of space and time together, creating the idea of spacetime: thinking of the volume we live in as the time we experience. The unity of space and time had further consequences;no longer being able to think of mass and energy as different,they must be thought of as the same, resulting in Alberts’ famous equation E = mc2. It would take Einstein another ten years to conclude the science he set into motion.
It’s 330 BC, Aristotle sits and ponders about his surroundings. He thinks of all that is. The matter that encompasses all that he sees. Then he thinks about the space that this matter resides in, the space of nothing between something. What is this nothing, this space that particles move within? How can it be nothing yet right now, it is a thing we are describing and evaluating. Over two thousand years later, Einsteins is still wrestling with this idea, another contradiction: space’s ability to be nothing yet something. Here, Einstein strikes again. 1925, he puts to paper his pièce de rèsistance, “The Theory of General Relativy”, Merging two separate entities into one, gravity and the empty space that troubled Aristotle for so long. This proposes that gravity is not a force that pushes or pulls objects but a byproduct of space’s geometry. Gravity is this space that Aristotle spoke of! Masses’ are not attracted to one another but instead bend and warp this “empty space” that is around them. It is through this curvature that leads objects toward one another, following the path of least resistance.
Here, we find time once again. If gravity could be warping space, and if Einstein had found space and time to be one and the same, then this gravity would be warping time as well. On Earth, we are not only in a well of its gravity but also in a well of its time. On the surface of the Earth, we travel through time at a unique rate only to the Earth. We exist in our own bubble of time together.
The Event Horizon
While thinking of warping space, Einstein would imagine a star. A giant in space: as you approach the surface, the violence becomes more evident, and flames, larger than the Earth, grow and shrink with unimaginable heat. Going below the surface, the energy of the fire only increases. At the center of the star, a reaction is taking place; hydrogen is being crushed by the weight of the star above. Fusing the hydrogen atoms together, fusion takes place. The energy from this reaction keeps the star in balance, repelling the great weight of the star from collapsing. But as the star ages, the fuel begins to run out. The fusion reaction slows and eventually stops. Einstein predicted that once this occurred, the star would no longer support itself, and the mass would begin to collapse, crushing the matter further and further, warping space further and further. Our reality gets pushed to its limit, spacetime warps into itself, a black hole is created, at its center, the entirety of the former star is compressed into one single point - a singularity.
As we explore a black hole, we will need to venture into quantum mechanics, and with that, we will need to unlearn a few of the things we have covered already because the Quantum world is a confusing and contradictory place.
The development of quantum mechanics would prove to be an arduous process that would consume the minds of scientists for the remainder of the 20th century and into the present. Its a challenging branch of science where particles faze in and out of reality and can exist in two states simultaneously. Properties that, on the scale of human life, average out and are unobservable, but on the microscopic level, these behaviors have large consequences. From the century of research, three postulates have emerged, three properties of the world granularity, indeterminacy, and relationality. We will discuss these in further detail, but for now, I can define them briefly and let them sit with you.
Granularity defines the world as made up of finite particles. Packets of mass or energy that can not be divided. This means that any system has a finite amount of information.
Indeterminacy states that the future state of a system can never be perfectly predicted; there is a randomness to the universe.
And relationality, everything is an interaction; everything is the observation of one thing to another. A place that can help us better understand this is the event horizon of a black hole: this is the edge of a black hole, an inflection point where light can no longer escape the warping space. A border to reality where nothing is thought to return. The edge of a black hole is a special place in this world. It is a place where two fundamental branches of our modern science collide. They predict, and they conflict. Like before, we have a contradiction between two fundamental branches of science, and from conflict comes revelation. The science that attempts to correct these contradictions is called Quantum Gravity.
In the 1970s, Stephan Hawking would postulate that black holes must have heat and, hence, radiate radiation.Einstein had said nothing can escape a black hole, not even light, yet Stephan was proving that these black holes were emitting heat. Energy was escaping the grasp of the black hole!
How is this possible? Einstein’s Theories are being contradicted, which means we are looking in the right place. How does Quantum Gravity investigate this? With the quantizing of space and time.
The Quanta
Granularity states how matter and energy are made up of granular finite packets known as particles, light is not a smooth string of energy but a series of particles called photons. Each a little packet of energy, separate from the adjacent photon, in between the two photons, space. In Quantum Gravity, granularity goes further; not only is matter and energy derived from particles, but space itself becomes granular. Not only is the stuff around us made of particles, but the very reality that we exist in is made from finite packets; these are known as quanta.
The theory that predicts these quanta is known as loop quantum gravity. Loop theory is studied worldwide and is one of the leading avenues in the search for quantum gravity. It describes the world as a sea of quanta; if a proton were the size of the Earth, these quanta would be nothing but a grain of sand; the scale is unimaginable. Space is not an empty vacuum but a foam of these quanta that create the structure of reality. These are the “pixels” of spacetime.
These quanta give us a clue into Hawking’s blackhole radiation. If we take quanta into account, we can begin to understand the radiation. We can consider the quanta closest to the event horizon. As the black hole rotates and mass travels into the black hole, the event horizon can fluctuate. These fluctuations of the blackhole are in turn the fluctuations of the atoms of space themselves, quanta. Through the uncertainty of these quanta, these fluctuations can cause a quanta that was once inside the blackhole and find itself outside the event horizon to return back into reality!
These are the nodes of our universe that do not exist in this container of space but are instead the container. A quanta is not in space; it is the space. They exist amongst one another, and it is their relation to the quanta around them that defines them: the state of a quanta is explained by its quanta neighbors. This shows the final principle of quantum mechanics. Relationality that an event in a system is always shown through the observation of that system. This sea of quanta is always moving, always interacting with one another, and it is which quanta are interacting with one another that defines its structure and therefore our reality.
The idea of a quanta puts a fundamental limit to the definition of the universe a bottom point; the infinitely small can not exist. Once again, Einstein is contradicted, for he stated that at the center of every black hole lies the singularity, a point of infinite density. But a quanta can only be packed so tight; they can not be pushed past their own geometry because they are the fundamental unit. So all that is left for them to do is push back, repel against the forces of the black hole, and explode, eject the singularity, a black hole explosion.
These have never been observed, but that does not mean they do not exist. For once matter moves beyond the event horizon, as we’ve stated, time slows from the intense gravity and practically stops. This would mean what feels like moments inside the black hole could be billions of years for an outside observer. These black holes may not have had enough time to explode yet.
A Bit
Now, I want you to imagine a vast sea. A sea of atoms that shake, move, interact. It is chaos; the particles mindlessly move around in a flurry. This is a representation of our universe - a giant soup of particles. But the universe does not actually behave like this; stars form and explode, planets form, and life grows upon them. We build and organize the world around us. Atoms do not move in a random manner but instead tend toward a state of greater complexity; this is information.
What is information? In the scientific world, information is confusingly defined as the number of alternative states of a system. For example, a coin has two possible states: heads or tails. Two possible states is known as a bit, a 0, or a 1. But what does this have to do with our moving atoms? Through this information lens, we can understand that atoms do not move in a random pattern but behave in a way in which the amount of possible groups atoms can exist in is always increasing until a finite point. This can be represented as a glass of water with an ice cube in it. As the ice melts, the atoms in the ice begin to speed up, and the glass becomes mostly water and approaches the temperature of the surrounding air. As the ice melts and becomes liquid water, the system transitions to a more disordered state. In the liquid state, water molecules have more freedom of movement and fewer restrictions on their positions compared to the ordered structure of ice; complexity has increased. This process can never happen in reverse because complexity must always increase, and possible information must increase. These are the rules that govern our world, and the same rules govern the quanta.
These quanta tend towards a more complex state. We can imagine a sea of quanta in an ordered state. Then, a quanta interacts with another quanta; they disappear from reality and reemerge in a new state, having a range of different possible outcomes, each with its own probability. This process does not happen in a given amount of time, it is the process from which time emerges from. These interactions happen outside of time, in between two moments at the exact same time. Quanta exist in one state, then interact and snap into a new state. There is no “during”, only a before and an after. This is the process that we all emerge from. On the scale of a human life, we see these events as a culmination of averages.
See a rock or a tree: on our scale, these objects exist because we have defined meanings for them, a defined border. There is the surface of the rock, and there is the air beside it. But at the quantum level, it is a sea of quanta interactions; their structure defines our space, and their interactions define our time. Both the rock and the air emerge from the same node structure of the quanta. On the quanta level, there is no discerning between the rock in the air; they are made from the same stuff. The only difference is the order they are in and it is the process of quanta interaction that causes the rock to age to decay.
Conclusion
It’s February 6th as I write this conclusion. Our journey has taken us from Einstein, 100 years ago, towards the future as we attempt to understand this quantum world better. When looking at the world from a quantum perspective, we begin the process of altering our perception. This is not only a pursuit of science but a pursuit of identity. These are the fundamental properties of the world we live in. These quanta make up everything that is, and all that results - society, art, love, and consciousness - stem from the rules of this quantum world. It’s complicated, it’s counterintuitive, but it’s important. Not because we need to understand our reality in completeness, but by thinking about the world of quanta helps us think about all parts of life. The sea of nodes is connected by links: granular in their structure, unpredictable in their movement, and defined by the nodes around them. These are the properties of the quantum world but are also the properties of ours. These discoveries of the quantum world are what push us all forward. It has always been this investment in science that allows art and society to achieve new things. And with a newfound understanding of science, we can begin to learn more about the self.