Brady and I were watching a “science behind Stargate SG-1″ type thingie this evening, and something struck me while the one guy was describing an electron moving from one place to another in quantum theory (it starts in one place, and takes an infinite number of routes to arrive at the other). He used the typical line that it only follows a specific route if it’s observed. That line has always bugged me, and tonight I realized why — how do humans (a massive collection of jiggley little molecules) count as a single observer for an event? Wouldn’t each of your molecules (all of them behaving at the quantum level in the same manner as the one you are observing) count as an observer? And wouldn’t they view them all differently, as they would be observing the Heisenberg uncertainty of the molecule as that molecule was doing the same with them?
My thought process went from that to, “Well, wouldn’t each person observe these things differently? Maybe the average of their molecules observed things differently than the average of my molecules viewed it.” That kicked me straight over to, “Aha! We have all of these irregularities at the quantum level, but we observe the world at Einstein’s relativistic level, and more specifically at the Newtonian level. Therefore, relativism is the statistical average of the behaviors of large numbers of particles at the quantum level.” It seems to me that the majority of the conflicts between quantum theory and relativity come when they start trying to poach on each other’s territory. Quantum theory has a terrible time with the macro scale, and relativity doesn’t seem to work properly when projected onto the micro scale. The way to unite the two theories would be to discover the quantum interactions that give rise to the statistical average of the relativistic behavior we see on our own scale.
I have no idea how accurate any of this is. It’s quite possible that I have some of my facts wrong, and it shot me off in the wrong direction. Besides that, it’s more of a philosophical argument than a scientific hypothesis (which is why I put this under the category of ‘Philosophy and Religion’ — it wasn’t just because I almost never post anything in those topics). If anybody out there has any more expertise in the field than I do, feel free to comment or email and let me know. I just thought it was an interesting thought and that I should write it down so I could confuse/bore all of you, and possibly make bizarre claims when I’m an old man and they figure out all this physics stuff that I actually had it right lo these many decades ago. I’m going to really enjoy being a crazy old guy.