The new discovery of a much simpler way to calculate what is likely to happen when two ultra-miniscule particles interact across very small distances (quantum scale) is making the news today. There is a whole lot of misunderstanding about this news, so I thought I’d try to use an analogy to help folks understand what it means – assuming I’m reading it correctly (I could, of course, be wrong).

The amplitu-hedron is a graph of possible interactions among particles at a scale so small it’s hard to imagine.

Think of it as a chart of the potential outcomes of all the possible crash scenarios of every single car on a very crowded highway at one moment. (AKA, if car 1 hit car 2, it might spin this way or that way, and car 2 might accelerate or slow and spin yet another way, and car 3 ….).

Plot out all possible scenarios for car 1 (got a flat and swerved, vs rear-ended the car ahead, vs got rear-ended, vs got clipped by a car changing lanes, etc. Repeat them all taking into account situations whether the driver panics, remains calm, is on the phone, etc., etc., etc.).

The resulting graph for car 1 will show that certain interactions (like hitting car 2’s bumper) occur in many of the possible scenarios, and certain interactions happen in none, one, or few scenarios.

When a the probability of a particular interaction appears more frequently for a given car, the line on the graph will have a greater amplitude (be higher) at the spot for that interaction.

Now if you overlay all the graphs for every single car’s possible accident scenarios into a single huge graph, you’re going to see a geometric shape that illustrates which interactions among the various cars are likely happen more or less often than others.

This does not mean that any or all of those accidents will ever happen, or has ever happened. It means only that you might be able to make an educated guess of which crash scenarios are more likely for any pair of cars.

The amplitu-hedron is that same graph, but for possible particle interactions for particles interacting at quantum scale.

Some interesting things were discovered when they started playing around with this new charting method: they discovered that the reason no one could get the math to work for gravity at such small scales is because they were adding math for things that aren’t relevant at that scale: space and time.

It turns out, that particles at that scale can interact with each other – even if they’re not next to each other, and even if they exist at different times. It’s a possibility, but it’s only one possibility, and for the most part, it’s rare.

Everything we can see, hear, or otherwise experience arises from the combination of all the interactions that have taken place among the particles of everything around us. Since the vast majority of interactions do occur between particles that are adjacent to each other at a given moment, the world we experience out here at the “macro” level appears to be one in which time and space are very relevant. For example, you notice when the particles in your shin interact with the particles of the corner of the coffee table. You would not notice if one or two particles out of those millions of particles didn’t interact at quite the same moment as the rest of them.

Some people are interpreting the fact that some interactions could occur when particles are not next to each other (in space or time) to mean there’s no such thing as space and time. That’s a serious misinterpretation.

All it really means is that space and time are not relevant to the calculations when you’re doing the calculations for the probabilities of particle interactions at this scale, so you have to do a whole lot less math than people thought, but space and time still exist.

One other cool thing to arise from figuring this out: Until now, physicists thought that if you added up all the possible probabilities for interactions between a pair of particles, they’d have to add up to 100% (or a probability of 1). Turns out that’s not true.

My take on this is that sometimes there may be no result at all when two particles interact. That’s pretty cool!