5 Common Beliefs Modern Physics Says Are Wrong

I went through this phase where I thought that the block universe had to be wrong because I couldn't possibly accept it psychologically. Even though science offered no resistance to it.

The perception that past, present, and future are equally real — that the universe simply is a four-dimensional block, and whatever happens in time moving forward is something that brains create, not what the universe does — was less an objective fact of science than a bad-faith philosophical sleight of hand.

But it's not. Today the laws of physics are not written with a "now." They describe a static four-dimensional structure in which the feeling of a passage of time just never appears in the equations.

Einstein's relativity does not treat time as a process. It treats time as a dimension of geometry — meaning that geometry bends near massive objects, runs slower at lower altitudes, and behaves differently for observers moving at different speeds.

Two people moving relative to one another don't agree on which events occurred simultaneously, and neither is wrong. Simultaneity turns out to be observer-dependent rather than a fact about the universe. There is no universal present ticking in the background.

The idea of a block universe never seems mystical to me. Just psychologically rude. Whether it's true, the sense of time passing is something nervous systems perform, not the universe — and I think that implication is underplayed. The past never disappeared. It's just not here.

Sometimes I still find myself picturing time that way, as though the future is somehow unreal, even though intellectually I no longer do. And I don't know what to do about that.

Lee Smolin challenges much of this view, and he is not a crank — one of the people most worth reading if you're not convinced, having questioned most carefully whether the block universe interpretation is indeed forced by mathematics or merely one reading among many.

What really changes the picture is the gravity angle. GPS satellites have to account for the fact that time actually runs faster at altitude — in a literal sense, not figuratively — or their positioning drifts by kilometers each day. That's not time as a flowing river. That's time as a local property of a geometric structure, different at every point.

The river picture isn't an approximation of something real. It's a whole different thing, completely.

Relativity was never so emotionally bothersome to me. The atom thing did it.

I read about atomic structure and said, for just an instant, things with touch just annoyed me. I found myself spending an embarrassing amount of time after that, pressing my hand against my desk as if that were the only way it would ever come to light.

The atom is nearly completely empty. All substances you can touch are atoms. The explanation for why you can't put your hand through a table anyway involves quantum mechanics.

The Pauli exclusion principle forbids electrons from sharing the same quantum states, and electromagnetic repulsion among electron clouds produces the resistance we feel as solidity. Solidity does not have to do with matter being there — it is a property of quantum laws that prevent overlap. The table appears solid thanks to interactions, not because there's stuff in it.

It's only worse once quantum fields become part of the story. What we call particles are excitations of underlying fields that permeate all of space. The electron is not a ball orbiting inside a nucleus — it is a disruption of an electron field spreading as a probability cloud. The so-called "empty space" inside atoms isn't empty, either. There is field fluctuation, all over.

The solar system model of the atom is the worst science pedagogy I can think of, because it sets the wrong intuitions, and then the right picture has to wrestle with them for years. At a certain point the metaphors don't help — they begin distorting the physics.

The odd correlations are real. Measuring one entangled particle immediately tells you something about its partner no matter where it is in space, and this has been done experimentally to an extraordinarily precise degree — the most rigorous demonstration of it earned scientists the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Local hidden variables cannot explain the correlations. They seem to happen in an instant.

But people still sneak communication into the explanation even though nothing is being transmitted. Entanglement is no way to send a message.

There is no signal transmitting between particles. There's no mechanism. Physicists have taken this for granted for decades, even if pop science explanations are still blurring it.

Scientific American argued a few years back that the framing of "spooky action at a distance" tends to render entanglement harder to comprehend than easier, and ultimately makes people believe the wrong thing altogether. I think that's right.

Without the faster-than-light metaphor, the phenomenon is truly strange — but strange in the right way, not a wrong one.

The Big Bang was not some location explosion. It happened everywhere at once.

Space itself broadened; matter didn't extend outward into pre-existing space. There's no center. There's nothing like an edge that matter is expanding toward. When galaxies move away from us in outer space, they're not fleeing from some early point — the distance between us is stretching as space itself expands.

Physicists disagree about whether there's a "before" the Big Bang. Some take the question to be significant and unanswerable with current physics. Some believe it's a category error — that asking what happened before time started is like asking what lies north of the North Pole.

I suspect the question may not survive whatever better theory eventually supplants the current one, but I hold that loosely.

What relativity really says is that nothing with mass can be accelerated to the speed of light, and no information can travel faster than that. Both of those hold.

But a number of other things move faster than light without violating either constraint, because they don't convey information and don't cause mass to pass through space.

Some distant galaxies are receding from us faster than light because the distance between us is expanding — not because they're moving through space at that speed. Relativity has nothing to say about that. Phase velocity, the rate of propagation of wave crests in particular media, can also exceed light speed without carrying anything along with it.

Quantum entanglement correlations seem to be instantaneous.

Pop science explanations usually flatten this out, which simplifies things — but so that the exceptions feel arcane when they're actually just pretty straightforward applications of rules physicists stopped being surprised by a long time ago.

I don't have a strong emotional reaction to this one the way I do to the time thing or the atom thing. It feels more like a clarification than a revelation. Perhaps because I encountered it later, when I'd already gotten used to physics being counterintuitive. Or perhaps it's actually less upsetting than the rest and I'm rationalizing. Hard to say.