Quantum Theory - Relativity Takes a Vacation

Ever had this happen? You drove into a car wash bay and it started up. Then the machine moved back and forth, completely enveloping the car. Didn't it feel as though the car were moving? If you've had this experience, or one like it, then you know something about Relativity. You know how your senses can be fooled by the lack of a fixed reference. In simple terms, Relativity relates one thing, or a group of things, to something else. But that's only part of the story.

Everything in our mechanical universe is in motion. Everything moves but we perceive movement at different rates dependng upon perspective and the presence of a fixed standard. There are two criteria involved in this observation; the Event Scale and the Visual Scale.

The Event Scale is the scope of the activity; the Visual Scale is the range of our ability to observe the event. As in the car wash example, the Visual Scale is overwhelmed by the event: the machine completely envelops the car and there is no fixed reference. The same would be true for an observer standing ten feet away from railroad tracks with an express train passing at high speed. Stand a mile away from the racing train and the progress can be measured, at least in terms of the relative movement of the train with respect to distance. The farther away it is, the slower it appears to be moving. This is because the Event Scale is much smaller than our Visual Scale: the train takes longer to traverse our range of visibility. Moreover, as the train is seen from farther away it appears to move even more slowly until it reaches what artists know as the "vanishing point" where two parallel lines seem to come together. If the train were still visible at this distance it would seem not to be moving at all because the distance between the starting point and the end point would approach zero. That's why the stars in the night sky seem fixed in position: they are large enough to be seen from lightyears distant but the Event Scale is so small that movement may only be detected over a span of time. If we could grow to such size as the Millky Way apperaed to be the size of a dinner plate we would clearly see a great deal of movement.

Quantum Theory grew out of the reverse perception: an Event Scale that is infintiely smaller than out Visual Scale. As in the preceeding discussion, the scale of events at the atomic level approach zero with respect to our Visual Scale so that the events seem to occur instantaneously. It's the same as our dinner-plate Milky Way: what appears to be fixed and motionless at the Ultra-macro scale, accelerates at the Ultra-micro, giga-, pico-, or tera-scale.

Suppose now that we could shrink ourselves down to the point that an electron were the size of the earth. Relativity tells us that we would perceive no movement at all, just as we experience ourselves on this planet. The vast distances between the nucleus of the atom and its satellites would be such that we would bserve them in the very same way that we observe the night sky: no perceptible movement.

The Special Theory of Relativity was introduced at about the same time as Max Planck concluded Quantum Theory. Without this vital tool Planck and his cohorts believed that, at the atomic level events were occurring at higher rates than at our own level of perception: things seemed to be moving at incredible speeds. They were, but solely on the basis of our range of perception being so much greater, not because they are actually moving at these rates in situ. Even today, a treatise on Quantum Theory makes for bizarre reading; muons, mu-mesons, gluons, weak forces, and let's not forget "strange" forces! Whatever useful information derived from Quantum Theory, from the Relativistic point of view its basic premise is false.

That this is mmore than a mere academic exercise will become clear in the next article on the Big Bang.