It's only massless particles that are lightlike, and so have an existence that (from their frame of reference) consists entirely of the interaction between what emitted them and what absorbed them. — Pfhorrest

Okay... So all elementary behaviours are then creation and annihilation events that, in the frame of reference of the thing being created and annihilated, take no time and traverse no space. I'd go with that.

Then the massive electron as we know it is a series of such events, each timeless but constituting the ticks of the electron's "experience". These are the atoms of experience? And for us macroscopic blighters, the atoms of our experience are similar things: the destruction of a photon from one bit of a car, the destruction of a photon from another bit, and so on, building up over (brief) time the experience of seeing a car. That sort of thing?

Yup. :up:

Okay, I get it, I dig it, and I almost agree with it.

"Experience" here can be taken as equivalent to QM "observation". When a human observes something, they are still doing the thing that an inert object merely interacting with it does, that causes (or is) wavefunction collapse or entanglement or the splitting of worlds, however you want to interpret it. — Pfhorrest

This obviously isn't the case for the Higgs. For instance, the electron interacts with the Higgs field as it goes through the left slit and is it goes through the right. The observation, in the Copenhagen sense, has not occurred.

The human hasn't done the observation yet, so the human isn't entangled with the electron / hasn't collapsed its waveform / hasn't split into multiple versions yet. But the Higgs field already has. It's Wigner's Friend, where we are Wigner and the Higgs is our friend.

Ah okay, so MWI-stylee.

Yeah pretty much, though I think the underlying reality is agnostic to QM interpretation, as they work out to equivalent results: from an a given observer's point of view it's fine to talk of wavefunction collapse, even if from an outside perspective that observer just entered a superposition along with what they observed.

(This is a common trend in my philosophical thinking: a lot of supposedly contradictory things work out to the same thing in the end, and the seeming contradictory perspectives are just different, equally valid ways of looking at the same underlying reality. See for example the earlier notion of a true solipsism just being equivalent to the self being part of the world. Or I guess the whole topic of this thread, where phenomenalism, which is like idealism, boils down to the same thing as physicalism, which is like materialism, even though materialism vs idealism is nominally a clash of opposites).

MWI is much more severe than Copenhagen in this respect. Entanglement of superposed terms always leads to branching in the former but does not necessarily lead to collapse in the latter, which is minimally reserved for entanglement of measurement apparatus (inc. human beings). In other words, entanglement may occur many times between initial state preparation and collapse in Copenhagen. In principle, precisely when the cat dies could occur any time between the radiation detector triggering and the box being opened, depending on coherence.

Or I guess the whole topic of this thread, where phenomenalism, which is like idealism, boils down to the same thing as physicalism, which is like materialism, even though materialism vs idealism is nominally a clash of opposites — Pfhorrest

I tend to take this as a sign of incompleteness. If two theories with different ontologies yield the same results, there's usually a third that yields the other two under two different sets of incomplete, incorrect, or approximate assumptions. Or else one of the two is incomplete and the other is better. MWI, for instance, appears complete; Copenhagen does not, so MWI might be right, or else something else is right such that, when you omit or approximate true facts or add untrue facts, you can derive MWI or Copenhagen or other.

Either way, I guess your portrait of reality is insensitive to such things. The nodes of the web are frame-dependent due to, at a fine scale, the Higgs mechanism, while the edges are non-inertial. Like a non-inertial plenum or singularity resolved into a discretised web by choice of inertial frame.

Because of the distortion of space and time relative to motion, from the frame of reference of any given photon, the distance that it travels between whatever emitted it and your eye is zero, and the journey takes no time at all; from the photon's perspective, it exists only at a point and only for an instant,the whole of its being constituted entirely by the interaction between whatever emitted it and your eye. — Pfhorrest

Okay... So all elementary behaviours are then creation and annihilation events that, in the frame of reference of the thing being created and annihilated, take no time and traverse no space. I'd go with that. — Kenosha Kid

Wait isn't the concept of a reference frame for the speed of light meaningless? It doesn't make sense to talk about a frame where light is at rest since it's always moving at c, no?

Wait isn't the concept of a reference frame for the speed of light meaningless? It doesn't make sense to talk about a frame where light is at rest since it's always moving at c, no? — Mr Bee

Yes, but also the concepts of duration and distance. As the new Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose says, photons can't get bored.

Yes, but also the concepts of duration and distance. — Kenosha Kid

So are you suggesting that the reference frame of a photon is meaningless as well as the concept of duration and distance?

So are you suggesting that the reference frame of a photon is meaningless as well as the concept of duration and distance? — Mr Bee

The notion of duration and distance is meaningless for a photon, yes. While you can't choose a reference frame with a velocity of c, you can see that the proper duration of a photon is zero by taking the limit v->c.

The notion of duration and distance is meaningless for a photon, yes. While you can't choose a reference frame with a velocity of c, you can see that the proper duration of a photon is zero by taking the limit v->c. — Kenosha Kid

Sorry, I thought you meant they were meaningless in general (a bit tired right now), though I'm still not sure about the use of phrases like "for a photon" when it seems like the very idea of a perspective for light or other massless particles just simply doesn't make sense. Talking about the limit as v->c is different from talking about the situation of when v=c. This isn't to say that light does "experience" time or space or that it doesn't but rather that the whole notion is just undefined like 1/0.

Sorry, I thought you meant they were meaningless in general (a bit tired right now), though I'm still not sure about the use of phrases like "for a photon" when it seems like the very idea of a perspective for light or other massless particles just simply doesn't make sense. — Mr Bee

You can still calculate invariant quantities for photons even if you cannot construct a rest frame for them. The proper time is an example.

Talking about the limit as v->c is different from talking about the situation of when v=c. This isn't to say that light does "experience" time or space or that it doesn't but rather that the whole notion is just undefined like 1/0. — Mr Bee

Literally the same in fact. The reason why you cannot have a rest frame for the speed c is that the transforms from other frames are inversely proportional to the square root of (1 - v/c). When v = c, you get 1/0.

You can still calculate invariant quantities for photons even if you cannot construct a rest frame for them. The proper time is an example. — Kenosha Kid

My point still stands that I don't think we should call it the "perspective" of a photon, certainly not the "reference frame". Then again, I feel like that is neither here nor there with respect to the topic of this thread, so sorry for derailing it.

Literally the same in fact. The reason why you cannot have a rest frame for the speed c is that the transforms from other frames are inversely proportional to the square root of (1 - v/c). When v = c, you get 1/0. — Kenosha Kid

Exactly. I thought I missed something last night. The maths get very unhappy when you try v=c which is why the situation of an object travelling at the speed of light isn't applicable for relativity theory. That's why you need to rely on talk of the limit instead (like 1/x as x->0), but that isn't really the same as talking about the case when v=c (or when x=0 for 1/x), as I stated earlier.