Think of anywhere – or any when – in the entire Universe where you might possibly want to go: you are, incredibly, already there.
Let’s ponder time travel, boys and girls.
Particles can sometimes appear to occupy points in space: with definable positions relative to some other object, such as the apparatus with which they are being viewed. When viewed in this manner, however, what the particle is actually doing cannot be ascertained. When we want to know what a particle is doing we have have to view it as a wave. This is called ‘wave-particle duality’ [wiki].
When a particle appears in its ‘wave-like’ form it could be described as being ‘smeared out’: that is, existing at more than one point – in more than one place in space and time. Okay, lets simplify things a little. Think of it this way: a particle is a wave with a ‘focal locality’. The focal locality is a point in space where most of the the wave’s ‘presence’ is concentrated or focused at any single point in time.
What fun.
We must conduct a ‘thought experiment’ —an experiment in our heads, not the real world:
Imagine a Universe in which there exists only a single planet. The planet possesses mass and, in the classic Einsteinian gravitational model fashion, warps space-time around itself to form a gravity well. [wiki]
On the planet there lives a man who builds a spaceship that he equips with a device that can detect warped space no matter how infinitesimally small the distortion might be. The man climbs into his spacecraft and blasts off.
As he travels outward from the planet he continually monitors the gradually decreasing amount by which the planet’s presence is warping the space around his craft. The question now becomes: how far out from the planet must the man travel before the space around his craft becomes completely flat?
You guessed it: It doesn’t matter how far the man travels – the further he goes space will continue to become flatter and flatter – but at no point will it become completely flat.
And so it is with our particle: As we move outward from the central focal locality; there is less and less particle present; at at no point however does the particle cease to have ‘presence’ completely.
The implications of this phenomenon are simply staggering: The particle exists at every single point throughout space and time.
Star Trek style teleportation will one day become possible because we all exist, we all have ‘presence’, throughout the totality of the Cosmos.
Think of anywhere – or any when – in the entire Universe where you might possibly want to go: you are, incredibly, already there.
