Physicists Find That As Clocks Get More Precise, Time Gets More Fuzzy (sciencealert.com)

Physicists "have combined two grand theories of physics to conclude not only is time not universally consistent, any clock we use to measure it will blur the flow of time in its surrounding space." An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have applied quantum mechanics and general relativity to argue that increasing the precision of measurements on clocks in the same space also increases their warping of time... [W]hile the theories are both supported by experiments, they usually don't play well together, forcing physicists to consider a new theory that will allow them both to be correct at the same time...

In this case, the physicists hypothesized the act of measuring time in greater detail requires the possibility of increasing amounts of energy, in turn making measurements in the immediate neighborhood of any time-keeping devices less precise. "Our findings suggest that we need to re-examine our ideas about the nature of time when both quantum mechanics and general relativity are taken into account," says researcher Esteban Castro.
The article opens with the statement that "time is weird," noting that despite our own human-centric expectations, "the Universe doesn't have a master clock to run by."

Comments

Forget time

[little1973]

https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.383...

Time is just the sequence of events. And events on the smallest scale are particle interactions.

What if there is an unknown quantum field which creates a barrier between particles? And particles have to "tunnel" through it in order to interact?

When this quantum field is more disturbed (warped, etc) this barrier will be greater and it would be harder to particles to interact with each other. The end result is "time" slows down since the number of interactions drops.

Note that an observer (in its own reference frame) will not notice anything (in the same way as in general relativity) since the observer just counts the number of interactions. To that observer the same number of interactions means the same amount of "time" passes.

And yes, this means this quantum field would be a distinguished reference frame.

Re:It's all a simulation

[Greyfox]

Yes! And time is so problematic because the simulation is being run on a massively parallel system. While each processor is able to handle the physics and timing of a small area reasonably well, keeping time synchronized for the entire universe would slow the entire thing down far too much. Moreover, since the project was designed as a simple demonstration of how to convert hydrogen to plutonium over time, making an effort to do so was deemed unnecessary. We also had a problem with some particles being uninitialized upon creation and going off at a very high velocity, so the top speed in this particular universe simulation was capped to prevent anything too untoward from happening.

The simulation has been running reasonably well for the amount of effort put into it, although there are still some issues of localized processors crashing when mass values in specific locations go too high, and some number of processors have been having to synchronize their timing signals across boundaries for reasons we do not currently understand. There is also the minor issue that eventually the plutonium degrades back to hydrogen, along with everything else, but we had no intention of ever allowing the simulation to run that long anyway.

Re:You see?

[bugs2squash]

And yet I see among the first reactions to us having put misogynists and racists into power is "this is not who we are". Turns out it is who we are, we need to own it and find a way to collectively become better people.

Semantics matter

[93 Escort Wagon]

"Physicists Find That..."

Given that this wasn't a presentation of new research data, but rather an argument attempting to reconcile two theories - it is incorrect to claim that they "found" anything. Replacing that word with "argue" would fix that.

Although perhaps there's a Slashdot corollary to all this stating the more accurate a headline is, the more fuzzy the linked article will be...