Chapter 14 - World Ribbons

Portent

The conventional metaphor for breaking out of a paradigm is thinking outside the box. The allusion is that the walls of the box block a view of what is outside the box. This is harder than it looks, it requires inspired guessing, and ruthless pruning. Most ideas are…junk, one can find oneself not just out of the box, but off the table and onto the floor. Usually, the current box does present some clues about how to do this, unsolved problems that focus our attention, threads to pull on that tug on some hidden assumption. There is a chance. Once in the new box, it too will eventually have unsolved problems, clues that lead to the next box, etc. - you are always in a box.

But, what if, you cannot find the next box? What if, you are in a box where the clues all seem to be dead ends? What if, what you really need to get to is the box after that? But it’s clues are only revealed by getting to the immediate next box. What if that step is blocked? What if, you have to think out of two boxes at once?

Primary Docs

Paradigm Discourse:
Open the Barrier Boxes discourse in the next tab

Technical Chapter:
Open the World Ribbons chapter in the next tab

Significance

The world line of relativity is a classical abstraction - it denies the uncertainty of quantum systems. A stronger treatment is to introduce the idea of a world ribbon, a fat world line. The fatness is specified by the quantum uncertainty.

The gain is that a world ribbon focuses attention on the act of measurement, when the fat world line becomes thinner - discontinuously. The slope of the upper edge of a measured world ribbon is a clue to the privileged frame in which collapse occurs.