As I begin, I should point out that I am by no means a scientific expert. I have no degrees, and I didn’t even take physics in high school, since I instead studied three music subjects, German, and Ancient History. But I love science, even if only as someone who looks at it from the outside, not fully understanding how it is organised and governed, and as a writer I love it more specifically for the inspiration it can bring, and its defiant quirkiness.
It doesn’t matter if you think it’s odd that light is sometimes waves and sometimes particles and only seems to choose one or the other when observed, it just is.
Quantum mechanics is an utterly delightful field of science that I feel has come to rival religion in the list of things that scientists will pour money into to try and disprove. Erwin Schrödinger’s much-quoted example of the cat that is both alive and dead until observed is in fact an attempt to ridicule believers in quantum mechanics, a fancier way of saying “don’t be such idiots, of course it can’t be both until observed, just give up on this nonsense.” To which, presumably, people cried “well explain the light thing, then!”
A recent article on IFLS (I did warn you I wasn’t a science expert) recounts the story of two people who undertook experiments trying to clear some of the fog of confusion around the fundamental theory of quantum mechanics, that the observation of the light or atom or whatever object is when it actually becomes either a wave or a particle.
His results returned conclusions that apparently lead to one of two possibilities: ether that the theory of quantum mechanics is correct, or that a future event (the measurement) causes the photon to decide its past.
Most scientists (including the one who conducted the experiment in the article, found here: http://www.iflscience.com/physics/measurement-rules-quantum-universe) are sticking with the dominant theory of quantum mechanics, the former option, but it’s the latter that interests me in particular.
Having read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, his proposal that time does not in fact move while we stay static as we seem to observe it, but that we really move against the backdrop of a giant bubble of time in which we seem to perceive a linear timeline based on the rate of entropic decay placing each moment in order from least entropic to eventual total chaos, really struck a chord with me.
For the sake of a writer’s love of brilliant world-building gimmicks, combine these two things and you have a universe which at its basest level of photons and various other miniscule objects resists entropy’s hold over how everything else experiences time. A rock does not destroy itself in the past because it was crushed in the future; a cat is not both alive and dead until observed; but in this world I imagine, a photon can be changed for the entirety of its existence, future and present and past all, by one moment of observation somewhere in the middle.
I wish it were true, if we are being completely honest. I would like to think that entropy doesn’t decide everything. Maybe one day scientists will be able to tell us if my wish has been granted.