Wendy and I like explaining things to Pinkie Pie. We both take great joy in doing our best to make incredibly complicated scientific topics just simple enough that she can grasp them. The other day Wendy was trying to teach Pinkie Pie about the behaviour of fundamental particles and how quantum mechanics works. The thing Wendy was talking about was the fact that you don't actually know where a particle is exactly, and it could at any time just decide to be somewhere else. The example Wendy used to illustrate this is the idea that a person *could* theoretically teleport to Mars if all of their constituent particles did that at once.
It is unlikely. Like, really unlikely. Unlikely enough that nothing that unlikely will occur in the entire history of the universe... most likely.
But there is nothing theoretically stopping all the particles in your body from simultaneously teleporting to Mars.
The best part of this was that a few months ago when I was explaining similar concepts I also talked about particles teleporting and I used the exact same example. I could have talked about teleporting to Grandma's house, or Texas, or Jupiter, or just to the bathroom, but I used the example of teleporting to the surface of Mars.
I wonder if perhaps Wendy and I learned this concept from the same source, and that source used teleporting to Mars as an example to illustrate this very strange part of physics.
In any case I don't know that Pinkie Pie really has any better understanding of physics. But she does know that she could just teleport to Mars. Maybe. Probably not. Really, really probably not.
But if she *does* teleport to Mars, now she can be sure that it wasn't magic, but in fact an extremely likely event that is totally admissible in physics.
Presumably while she suffocates or freezes to death, I suppose, since Mars isn't exactly a nice place to live.
(The true odds on bet in the situation of appearing to be on Mars is clearly that she is hallucinating and she isn't really on Mars. That is considerably more likely than spontaneous teleportation, by about 100,000 orders of magnitude or so.)
I'm sure your estimate of 100,000 orders of magnitude is *way* too small. The amino acids in DNA are pretty simple, like 8-12 atoms, maybe a few hundred elementary particles. There's three billion of those in every cell. (There's lots of other particles in there too, but this was something I could easily count for a deep lower bound). Around 30 trillions cells in your body. So whatever the odds of an individual particle being on Mars is (which I presume is super unlikely) its *that* to the power of more than 10^20.
ReplyDeleteAnd *that*'s assuming the probabilities are independent, which I doubt.
Is time discrete or are there infinitely many moments? If there are infinitely many moments, then in the past minute you were on Mars. But only for 1 minute * probability of being on Mars.
ReplyDeleteI'm confused about this to. There is certainly a "shortest length of time" but that's not the same as time being discrete. At any rate, if you were on Mars, you couldn't have been there for less than about 10^-44 seconds, and that's far, far, far longer than you would be there in any given minute (or in any given lifetime of the universe).
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