Swiss physicist says intuitionist mathematics can clear up questions of physics and time

Quanta Magazine has published on the question of how time works, highlighting Swiss physicist Nikolas Gisin’s papers which have been said to clear up the “fog around physics,” according to an April 7 report.

There are issues with quantum physics when it comes to time – like the minute divide between the past and the future (that would be the present), which does not appear to exist in the laws of physics as we know them.

In order to make sense of the topic, Gisin has published four papers in the past year. He has come to the conclusion that the problem in quantum physics and time is all about the math.  So, he used a century-old mathematical language called intuitionist mathematics to explore the issue. In intuitionist mathematics, numbers with infinitely many digits do not exist.

Other scientists are reacting to Gisin’s work, like Nicole Yunger Halperin, a quantum information scientist at Harvard University.

“I found it intriguing. I’m open to giving intuitionist mathematics a shot,” Halperin said in response to Gisin’s recent article in Nature Physics.

Marina Cortes, a cosmologist at the University of Lisbon says that Gisin’s approach is “extremely interesting,” but has “shocking and provocative” implications. “It’s really a very interesting formalism that is addressing this problem of finite precision in nature,” Cortes said.

Intuitionism has many consequences for mathematics but perhaps the biggest change from standard math is the law of excluded middle -which says either a proposition is true, or its negation is true- doesn’t hold true.

This doesn’t apply to numbers like 4, .5 or pi, because 4 and .5 are definite, and there is an algorithm to generate the expansion of pi. It applies to numbers like 0.4999, where the unveiling of additional digits might show convergence to exactly .5 or if a lower number shows up in the sequence .499999999997 that number will always be less than .5.

Gisin suggests that it’s time to formulate laws of physics that include the present as a reality.

“I am a physicist who has my feet on the ground,” he said. “Time passes. We all know that.”