Thursday, December 20, 2018

Do We Still Need Quantization?

Thinking about it, I am uncertain if we do.  I'll need to go through a comprehensive set of quantized values to be certain, however.

For photon energy, quantization is just equivalent to the idea that there are a finite number of stable states for matter, and any deviation will cause perturbations until a new stable state is reached somewhere, at which point the perturbations will gradually cancel out.

For electron spin, we are now just describing relative orientation in time-space.  We are left with a potential situation in which high gravity and high energy atoms might spontaneously develop a third electron spin state, after the closed time cylinder expands enough for such a configuration, but that might not be relevant.  It does cause some issues with what we typically think of as Lorentz invariance, but meh.  (Basically, two electrons can occupy the same orbit because they are out of time phase with each other.  It is relative rather than absolute orientation that matters, so position isn't quantized either.)

For photon spin, we have four spin states corresponding to two sets of binary propositions.  This is harder, since both pairs behave similarly, and since my mental explanations imply that the relative time phase, my first instinct, will vary in relation to distance.  We might be able to say that light is a fundamentally heliptical wave, in which case we might be able to use two pairs of time orientation corresponding to forwards or backwards in time, each with respect to either the horizontal or vertical vectors.  That could work.  Just don't know.

In general it looks like there might be two types of quantization behavior: Binary quanta, corresponding to orientations across a symmetry.  Discontinuous scalars, corresponding to the energy differentials between different stable states of matter.

Inwhichcase, quantization is an illusion created by our mischaracterization of microscopic states of matter in terms of macroscopic states of matter - imagining the observed electron "spin" as a literal spin on a tiny sphere.  (There are a lot of "spin" entries in physics.  I suspect somebody lacked imagination.)

No comments:

Post a Comment