Early Philosophical Scientists applied Newton’s Laws and determined that a perpetual machine should be possible, at least perpetual motion of the second kind. None of Newton’s laws contradicts the possibility. However, they soon ran headlong into an oddity, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is not possible to deduce the Second Law from Newton’s Laws of motion, but lo and behold, heat loss appears to be inevitable, or as Rudolf Clausius concludes: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum”.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the only law of nature that makes a fundamental statement about past and future.
The Many-worlds Interpretation holds that each quantum event spins off a new universe. Under this view, it would hold that in an infinite number of similar universe sets Schrodinger's cat is dead, and a like set would see that Schrodinger's cat lives. This bothers me, and I can not believe it is this complicated.
I happen to prefer a form of the Decoherence Interpretation, that implies many timelines (equally real depending on relative viewpoint) will occur in the quantum state, and a loss of the ordering of the phase angles reduces the possible outcomes through cutting the number of relativistic timeslices. Relativity of simultaneity certainly exists at the atomic scale, even though it is impossible to judge its contribution to wave-particle duality. This reverses the many-worlds outcome back to the quantum state where I think it belongs. It will really irritate me when I'm proven wrong.
Take our good friend the protium atom for example. Nice and simple, One proton with a happy electron. According to the most accepted theories, protons are comprised of two up quarks and one down quark, held together by one of the four fundamental forces of nature, the strong interaction. This force is mediated by a swarm of gluons. All of this is packed into a space of about about 1.6 femtometre in diameter. For those that are wondering, that's small ( if you cut a foot long hot dog into slices to share with 2 trillion of your friends). What is really amazing is that those three quarks do not even come close to being crowded in that space. In that space, they do an elaborate dance in time with the strong nuclear force. The quarks rock, roll, and reel - constantly changing partners (and color!).
This dance is done at nature's maximum speed. In fact, the quark also has a spin, and no-one has quite figured out how to increase the speed of light to account for how that works. Usually we just say, "well, it is a point particle", meaning, "crap if I know". The proton has a positive electrical charge, and throws out magnetic field lines that can capture an electron to form the hydrogen atom. Each of these particles are moving at speeds that are significant and different from one another. The principles of the relativity of simultaneity come into play, even at these small scales.
 |
| THE PROTON LOCOMOTION DANCE |
This brings us to another of the four fundamental interactions in nature operating in the hydrogen atom, Electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is the force that holds the electron and proton together inside the atom. Even though the electron is a slow poke compared to the photons, gluons, and quarks, it still moves at an estimated 1,365 thousand miles per second. This means that for each partner in this dance, relativistic timelines exist where the down quark sees the electron in a different place and speed than its cousin the up quark. A complex dance, where each partner anticipates the movement of the next and is played out in multiple timelines. Saying that one timeline is more real than the next would be wrong, they are all equally valid. The multiple timelines at atomic scale would look like a probability wave. The particles would also need to obey basic laws within those timelines. For example, the electron will obey the Pauli's exclusion principle, allowing for a loophole to explain interference patterns at electron configuration nodes.
