Christophe Galfard: A Mathematician's Journey to Understanding Time and Space

Los errores son imprescindibles para dar con aciertos y progresar.

Waking up in the same place in which you dozed off has never happened either to you or to anyone else. Ever. Earth does not stop moving when you sleep. Every hour that passes, Earth travels a little more than 800,000 kilometres around the centre of our galaxy. And so do you. That’s the equivalent of about twenty trips around the planet. Every hour. No one minds, though, as long as their bed stays still beneath their body.

A clock that is moving through space at a very fast speed does not tick at the same rate as a slow-moving watch gently attached to your wrist as you stroll on a tropical beach. The idea of a universal time – a godlike clock that could somehow sit outside our universe and measure, in one go, the movement of everything in it, how its evolution unfolds, how old it is and all that – does not exist.

La ciencia no es como la política.A la naturaleza le trae bastante sin cuidado lo que opine la gente, incluso si son mayoría.

En cierta manera, la visión literal de Everett de la física cuántica dice que si dejas de lado el egoísmo nunca estarás triste. Cuando te pasa algo malo aquí, un número infinito de túes en un número infinito de universos paralelos no sufren esa mala noticia y continúan tan felices.

Quantum particles do not behave like tennis balls, but like the quantum particles they are. To get from one place to another, they take all the possible paths in space and time as long as these paths link their starting point to their end point. The particle [...] literally went everywhere. Simultaneously. To the left and to the right of the post. And through it. And outside the room. And into the future and back - until the moment when it hit a detector on the wall.

Waking up in the same place in which you dozed off has never happened either to you or to anyone else. Ever. Earth does not stop moving when you sleep. Every hour that passes, Earth travels a little more than 800,000 kilometres around the centre of our galaxy. And so do you. That's the equivalent of about twenty trips around the planet. Every hour. No one minds, though, as long as their bed stays still beneath their body.

The very small quantum world, it seems, is a mixture of possibilities. The quantum fields to which all particles belong are the sum of these possibilities and, somehow, one possibility is chosen out of all the existing ones just by seeing it, just by the very act of detecting it, whenever one tries to probe a particle's nature. Nobody knows why or how this happens.

Mankind has uncovered two extremely efficient theories: one that describes our universe's structure (Einstein's gravity: the theory of general relativity), and one that describes everything our universe contains (quantum field theory), and these two theories won't talk to each other.

A clock that is moving through space at a very fast speed does not tick at the same rate as a slow-moving watch gently attached to your wrist as you stroll on a tropical beach. The idea of a universal time - a godlike clock that could somehow sit outside our universe and measure, in one go, the movement of everything in it, how its evolution unfolds, how old it is and all that - does not exist.