If you drop the cup, it will break – or will it?
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If you drop the cup, it will break. When you press the light switch, the light bulb lights up. Effect follows cause – it is a hard and fast rule of the universe. Except, perhaps, on a basic level. Because when you’re dealing with the electrons behind the operation of a light switch or the atoms in a light bulb that convert electrical energy into light, causal relationships seem much more vague.
In 2017, a team from the University of Vienna in Austria reported on experiments that demonstrated that in the quantum realm of atoms and particles, it is impossible to say which observations are effects and which are causes. did. In the words of the researchers who conducted the experiment, it was “the first definitive demonstration of a process with indeterminate causal order.”
Still, the broader research community stuck with its coffee mug. In fact, it was welcome news for at least some of those trying to figure out where space-time came from. For them, a quantum theory of gravity in which spacetime is an emergent property of the more fundamental building blocks of the universe may necessarily lack the clear unidirectional causality of everyday life.
The space-time described by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity already has some ambiguity when it comes to defining the order of events. People who move in space and time in different ways have different “frames of reference,” but people who move in different ways do not always…
Source: www.newscientist.com
