So a Physics master’s student friend of mine tried to explain it to me but I just got more confused. Apparently it has to do with whether time is an actual thing or a 4th dimension on the space-time blanket?
He said that because you can look at the cat and see if it’s alive or deaf that meant Quantum mechanics implied a discrete existence of time, there was a time where the cat was uncertainty both alive and dead, and a time after the observation, but relativity… wouldn’t have an event take place in actual time?
Help me out hivemind this has gone over my head but I feel so bad he looked so crestfallen when I didn’t get it. I studied English in school and managed to avoid even touching Calculus. I want to at least understand the thing he said.
In: Physics
Schrödinger’s cat is a though experiment about quantum mechanics that’s not relevant here.
The reason is really hard to eli5 because you really need the math to understand why, but I’ll give it a shot.
The ELI5 answer is that that quantum mechanics is discrete and general relativity is continuous. Think of stairs vs a ramp. Quantum mechanics is like stairs. Stairs have individual, separate steps. You can have 1 step or 2 steps, but you can’t have 1.5 steps. They exist as discrete things. General relativity on the other hand, is like the ramp. It’s smooth and continuous. You can measure any arbitrary section of the ramp – it doesn’t have discrete parts.
When you do the math and you try to treat quantum mechanics as if it’s continuous or general relativity as if it’s discrete, you get nonsense. It’s like putting 2 + 2 into a calculator and the calculator tells you the answer is potato. It’s just doesn’t make any sense.
So in short, when we try to combine quantum physics and general relativity, the math doesn’t make any sense, which tells us that they cannot be combined in any way that we’re doing now.
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