Doing some insomniac reading of the Quantum Sequence, I think that I’ve gotten a reasonable grasp of the principles of decoherence, non-interacting bundles of amplitude, etc. I then tried to put that knowledge to work by comparing it with my understanding of virtual particles (whose rate of creation in any area is essentially equivalent to the electromagnetic field), and I had a thought I can’t seem to find mentioned elsewhere.
If I understand decoherence right, then quantum events which can’t be differentiated from each other get summed together into the same blob of amplitude. Most virtual particles which appear and rapidly disappear do so in ways that can’t be detected, let alone distinguished. This seems as if it could potentially imply that the extreme evenness of a vacuum might have to do more with the overall blob of amplitude of the vacuum being smeared out among all the equally-likely vacuum fluctuations, than it does directly with the evenness of the rate of vacuum fluctuations themselves. It also seems possible that there could be some clever way to test for an overall background smear of amplitude, though I’m not awake enough to figure one out just now. (My imagination has thrown out the phrase ‘collapse of the vacuum state’, but I’m betting that that’s just unrelated quantum buzzword bingo.)
Does anything similar to what I’ve just described have any correlation with actual quantum theory, or will I awaken to discover all my points have been voted away due to this being complete and utter nonsense?
Leave a Reply