One-Electron Universe

edgyquant

I always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?

amelius

This theory adds more complications than it creates simplifications.

staplung

“One electron ought to be enough for everyone.”

netbioserror

Then wouldn't it be "one-photon"? I've heard (but don't fully understand) that massed particles are simply photons trapped in toroidal vortices, which gives them an outward charge field and lets them interact with the Higgs. Annihilation supposedly just being untangling the toroid.

abeppu

Even if there were as many positrons as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab spontaneously condense into a very low entropy concentrated configuration?

diablomablo

My thought is that if there's only one electron, then its probabilistic location at a place and a time, should be impacted by its own energy across all places and times. That quantum gravity comes from generalizing the Schrodinger's equation to include these energies in the phase of the wave function, causing the phase to skew and the probability to update towards the location of large mass/energies.

lolakutty

Space and time are illusions. So probably true in some sense...There is probably no electron at all...I mean, one would be quite arbitrary, why not two?

stared

In the line, I recommend „The Egg” by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

mvlipwig

This might be a result of me not understanding theoretical physics, but this seems "not even wrong." How could you even go about testing this?

api

Another interesting one is the black hole electron: the electron as a stable micro black hole, possibly super-extremal. Probably not, but apparently some of the math does work. There's been some attempts to model all particles as micro black holes or stable quantum scale gravitational objects of some kind.

chasil

CP-violation would appear to rule this out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation The main referenced wiki suggests that the missing positrons are inside protons, but recent a recent LHC experiment asserts CP-violation over baryons.

ck2

it's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idea right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser) but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk

lioeters

A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe. It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.

krylon

Gotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).

tomasphan

How does this work with QFT? If an electron is just an excitation in a field then it being “one electron” is meaningless.

gradus_ad

It may not be one electron but it is one field.

throwaway27448

How meaningful is this actually? Is this a measurable distinction, or a conceptual one with the same semantics?

dualvariable

Isn't this proven incorrect by CP-violating processes that also violate T-symmetry (preserving CPT)?