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

Re:It's all a simulation

[goombah99]

It's interesting that all the funny bits of quantum theory and relativity and light are infact identical to what you would expect to be the rules of any simulation.

For example, if you aren't looking at something in a video game it doesn't get rendered, ergo schrodingers cat like phenomena. The moon in fact is not there if you don't look at it.

Bells theorem rules out local hidden variables (that is variables that are in the game but are not coupled to you the observer) but it allows global hidden variables to explain all spooky action at a distance by means other that quantum entanglement. that is to say it's what should happen in any simulation in which you are part of the simulation too.

diffraction and the heisenberg uncertainy relationships come from discrete binning. For example, in a pixelated universe you can'e actually resolve angles of far away objects since they are pixelated. hence there's a direction-position uncertainty.

Likewise the more finely you allow a simulation to measure time the more finely you have to bin or divide the external clock requiring more energy.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it's Heisenberg up to his usual antics. Time and energy appear as conjugate variables in the quantum wave function solution to the Schroedinger equation for an oscillator (like a ticking clock), so the precision of your clock (delta-t) is inversely proportional to the precision of your energy measurement (delta-E), in the same way that the precision of position and momentum measurements are limited by the uncertainty principle.

Energy curves its surrounding space under General Relativity. This would imply energy of whatever system does the ticking in your clock is constantly being "measured" by, at a minimum, the fabric of space-time, independent of how well you isolate it from the rest of the clock. So that puts a limit on the uncertainty in the energy measurement of whatever does the ticking. If delta-E is limited to be below a certain size, then delta-t is forced to be above some size, so you necessarily get some small variation in the time between ticks of the clock.

This results in a tradeoff between precision and accuracy. Precision requires many small ticks, so delta-t makes up a larger fraction of the duration of each clock's tick. A clock which ticks less often becomes more accurate (delta-t is a smaller fraction of the total time between ticks), but fewer ticks limits the precision of your measurement.

At least, as a physics grad student, that's how I've interpreted the result that TFA is utterly failing to convey properly.