Nothing But Ratios - physicist Julian Barbour

henningsittler

We've Been Wrong About Entropy, Time, and Quantum Mechanics

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bImnQ9cmw

I think it's just possible that there really isn't any quantum mechanics at all. It's just a manifestation of classical physics that has not been recognized. This is a major discovery in Newton's theory of gravity, only four years old.  This is probably the most important symmetry in  physics. This is why I think we may have stumbled on the nature of creation.

Physics traditionally builds from notions of time and scale. However, today we have a treat with British physicist Julian Barbour, who argues that the universe is grounded fundamentally in relationships   between particles. And this upends even the primacy of wave functions. All the evidence can in principle be explained without any wave function. Discarding external clocks and rulers, Julian develops something called shape dynamics. This is where instantaneous configurations, or snapshots, are primary.
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statistics of the ratios of shapes

henningsittler

Time from shape space:

They were choosing out one part of the universe to be the clock and the rest to be the rest of the universe. So then I suggested, well,  first of all, it should be something which doesn't  depend on size. It should be scale-invariant. It  should be just something that depends upon the   size of the shape. And let's see what's happened.  So you can consider…I introduced a long time ago  the notion of shape space. So if you have three identical particles, their shape space, it just  consists of the complete set of all the shapes  that those three particles can make. There's one distinguished, which is the equilateral  triangle, and then they get more and more pointed.   So there's one particle here and two, and they get further out like that. So I suggested that quantum theory, the sort of the time of quantum  theory, should be something which measures that  quantity. And that quantity turns out to be very, very interesting. So I wrote down, I proposed a time-dependent Schrodinger equation where that quantity is the time. Now it's scale-invariant,  so it can't have a Planck's constant because  Planck's constant has got dimensions. It's got the dimensions of action. So that would mean already that Planck's constant would have to emerge out of the theory.