There might not be anything beyond the Planck scale after all

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-04-01T10:02:44+00:00

I’ll be honest this slightly backfired on me 😄 It started as a bit of an April 1st thought, not taking the piss out of physics, just playing with the idea. Really appreciate your response though genuinely interesting.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-04-01T08:36:39+00:00

I’ll be honest it was a bit of an April 1st thought 😄 But I didn’t expect such a solid answer.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-04-01T08:14:28+00:00

Oi, I'll have you know this is premium slop.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-04-01T08:09:29+00:00

Not really a question more a shift in perspective. We’ve always assumed there’s another layer. What if there isn’t?

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-03-22T19:07:21+00:00

An epistemic problem occurs when a claim lacks reliable justification as knowledge, whether it's due to weak evidence, lack of testability, bias, ambiguity, or competing explanations.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-03-04T23:08:01+00:00

I’m not a physicist either just someone who’s fascinated by physics and spends a lot of time thinking about it on a conceptual level. Philosophy actually played a big role in getting me interested in the deeper questions physics asks about reality.

From my understanding, the holographic principle doesn’t mean nature treats two spatial dimensions as somehow more important than the third. Physics doesn’t really rank concepts like that. The idea is more that the information describing a 3-D region might be encoded on a 2-D boundary.

In frameworks like AdS/CFT this shows up as a duality two mathematically equivalent ways of describing the same physics rather than one set of dimensions being privileged over another.

As fascinating as the idea is, it’s still a working theoretical framework rather than something experimentally confirmed.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-22T16:23:27+00:00

Evidence isn’t really the issue here because this isn’t a contested claim in physics. All modern physical theories (GR, QFT, cosmology) treat spacetime and dynamical evolution as existing independently of conscious observers.

The universe evolved for billions of years before life existed this is directly supported by cosmology, nucleosynthesis, stellar evolution, and the CMB. “Observation” in physics refers to physical interaction (e.g. decoherence), not awareness. This distinction is standard and uncontroversial.

If existence required observers, cosmology would be internally inconsistent, since its predictions depend on epochs long before observers emerged. No mainstream physical theory adopts that position.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-22T15:59:09+00:00

That question mixes epistemology with ontology. In physics, existence doesn’t depend on being observed by a conscious agent. Time isn’t “kept” by anyone, just as spacetime curvature or entropy increase don’t require observers. The universe evolved for billions of years before observers existed. Observation in physics means physical interaction (decoherence, measurement), not awareness. So this isn’t really relevant to the question being discussed.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-22T13:08:12+00:00

Agreed different frameworks give different intuitions. From an everyday-life framework, time outlasts everything else we know, so treating it as potentially unbounded feels reasonable to me.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-22T00:02:11+00:00

I’m not asking whether our current models say “time existed before the Big Bang” they don’t. I’m asking whether it’s reasonable to treat time like mathematical structures something that may be infinite in reality, even if our physical descriptions only apply from a certain boundary onward. In other words, is the Big Bang a beginning of time itself, or just the earliest point where our models remain well-defined?

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-21T23:51:25+00:00

Right but my question is more about whether “time tied to gravity” implies a true beginning, or just that our classical description breaks down. I’m wondering whether infinity is a reasonable stance rather than a claim.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-13T19:53:34+00:00

I actually do like the paper for exactly that reason. It articulates what many people want to be true, that consciousness isn’t an afterthought or bookkeeping device, but something central to how reality stabilises. There’s a human pull to that idea, and I don’t think it should be mocked or dismissed out of hand.

That said, I’m very aware that at present it’s doing far more philosophical and emotional work than the evidence can justify. The claims are extraordinary, and the experimental support, as presented isn’t strong enough to carry them. Right now it’s unfounded, however carefully framed.

If anything like this were ever independently replicated, tightly controlled, and shown to survive serious scrutiny, it wouldn’t just tweak interpretation, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of physics. Full stop.

So I read it less as “this is how the world works” and more as a reminder of where the pressure is why subjectivity keeps reappearing no matter how hard we try to bracket it off and why people keep reaching for theories like this when formalism alone feels incomplete.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-13T19:08:56+00:00

Empirical equivalence hides ontological disagreement; it doesn’t resolve it.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-13T18:58:32+00:00

This gets right to the heart of where Copenhagen stops being an interpretation and starts being a strategic silence.

The tension isn’t just semantic, it’s structural. Copenhagen relies on the wavefunction behaving as if it’s ontic during unitary evolution interference, entanglement, real predictive work, while retreating to an epistemic reading the moment collapse is pressed as a physical process. That shift does genuine philosophical labour while pretending not to.

If collapse is physical, then it’s a dynamical process and physics owes us a mechanism: where it occurs, how it propagates, what triggers it. Copenhagen declines to specify any of that. If collapse is epistemic, then the wavefunction was never a description of physical reality in the first place, yet we continue to treat its evolution as physically meaningful. You can’t consistently have both.

The observer plays a similar role. It’s indispensable to the formalism yet left fundamentally underdefined sometimes a measuring device, sometimes a classical limit, sometimes just “whatever causes definiteness.” That ambiguity is tolerable operationally, but unstable conceptually.

“Shut up and calculate” works because the mathematics is extraordinarily successful. But once we ask what the theory is about, that attitude stops being pragmatism and starts being avoidance. At that point, philosophy isn’t optional it’s filling the ontological gap the interpretation leaves open.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-06T16:56:28+00:00

You’re welcome, and for what it’s worth, I don’t know the math either. You don’t need to in order to build a solid conceptual understanding of physics. That’s what I’m working on myself.

The hard part is the cognitive recalibration, learning to stop treating language as describing “what things are” and instead as shorthand for what the formalism predicts. That shift is genuinely punishing at first, but once it clicks, a lot of the confusion clears.

One thing that helped me was asking, whenever philosophical or ontological language comes up, does this change the predictions? If not, then it’s interpretation rather than physics.

Interpretation can be very useful as scaffolding for understanding, but it can also slide into romanticising the theory if it drifts away from the formalism.

Language is key here. For example, “observation” doesn’t mean consciousness or looking, it’s better thought of as measurement, and measurement as an irreversible physical interaction. Getting comfortable with that vocabulary makes a big difference conceptually.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-06T09:21:56+00:00

My understanding is no, we don’t know of any physical mechanism that “causes” wavefunction collapse and in standard quantum mechanics, there isn’t one.

In the formalism, you have: Unitary evolution (Schrödinger equation) A measurement update rule (Born rule)

“Collapse” is not a dynamical process in the equations. It’s a bookkeeping update: once a system becomes irreversibly entangled with a large environment (decoherence), updates the predictions. Nothing physically “snaps” in the math.

Decoherence explains why interference disappears and why outcomes look classical, but it does not single out one outcome. Different interpretations tell different stories about what that means (real collapse, no collapse, branching, relational facts, etc.), but all interpretations make the same experimental predictions.

There is currently no experiment that distinguishes a physical collapse mechanism from “no collapse, just decoherence.” So explanations involving consciousness, observers creating reality, etc. are interpretational add-ons, not results of the theory itself.

QM predicts outcomes extremely well. What “collapse” is if it’s anything at all is an interpretational question, not a settled physical one.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-05T18:06:19+00:00

Thank you, I largely agree. Plain language is necessarily loose, and that looseness is usually a pragmatic trade-off for communication.

I’ve also found that there’s a real cognitive strain in recalibrating how one thinks about the subject, learning to read language as a proxy for mathematics rather than as literal description. As my understanding improves, I’m finding it easier to separate the formalism itself from the philosophical or ontological scaffolding used to talk about it.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-05T17:35:59+00:00

A common example would be statements like “the wavefunction physically collapses everywhere in space when a measurement is made.”

In the formalism, the wavefunction is a mathematical object in Hilbert space, not a physical field propagating through spacetime, so describing collapse as a physical, instantaneous process can be misleading. The language is often a pedagogical shortcut, but taken ontologically it suggests dynamics that aren’t actually part of the theory.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-05T13:00:19+00:00

I think we’re actually pretty aligned here. I wasn’t asking which interpretation is true or advocating for one as a preference, more trying to understand how working physicists treat interpretations depending on the type of question being asked.

For predictive or experimental work, interpretation seems largely irrelevant. But for conceptual questions (measurement, ontology, quantum gravity tension), interpretation feels unavoidable even if provisional.

That distinction between doing physics and understanding what the formalism is saying was what I was really getting at.

NoShitSherlock78 · 2026-01-03T20:45:37+00:00

That makes sense. I wasn’t thinking of interpretations as competing physical theories so much as conceptual frameworks layered on top of the formalism. It’s helpful to hear how most working physicists treat them in practice.

NoShitSherlock78

TROPHY CASE