There is a gangrenous rot at the heart of modern physics. The two
most successful pillars of modern physics, quantum theory and general
relativity, are at loggerheads, and something has to give.
There is no clearer demonstration of this than in the study of quantum
mechanics in curved spaces. Quantum mechanics works well in the flat
Euclidian space in which we appear to live, but nobody knows how it
fares in the curved space that general relativity predicts. And
surprisingly, physicists have spent little time bothering to find out.
Advertisement
But today, Rossen Dandoloff from the Universite de Cergy-Pontoise, in
France, takes a stab at nailing the behavior of quantum particles in
the highly curved geometry of a wormhole.
This story is only available to subscribers.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
His starting point is the Heisenburg Uncertainty principle, which
states that you cannot know a particle’s location in space and its
momentum at the same time. It is only possible to measure one or the
other with any degree of certainty.
Dandoloff points out that if space is stretched so that the
uncertainty in position is greater than it would otherwise be in a
flat space, then the uncertainty in momentum must be less. And that
means the energy of the particle must be lower too.
So a highly curved region of space must act like a potential well,
pulling quantum particles toward it (since they’ll naturally move to
the region with the lowest energy).
Dandoloff calls this the quantum anticentrifugal force.
A similar effect has been found for certain quantum particles in
two-dimensional space, one of a number of strange forces that arise
when you fiddle with the space. These forces are called quantum fictitious forces because they
vary according to the dimensions of space, and so can’t arise in the real space in which the universe is embedded (at least that’s how the thinking goes).
But that raises another question: what exactly is the space in
which the universe is embedded? There’s no consensus on that, and
until there is, quantum physics and general relativity will continue
to live in a twilight world of theoretical ambiguity where quantum forces may or may not be fictional.
