When I did the math on approaching black holes I had an epiphany - the very big and the very small are somehow related.
Electrons absorb photons and jump to some higher energy orbit.
Sometimes they shed energy as a photon and fall to some lower energy level.
In ruby, ultra-violet light is absorbed and red light is emitted - this is how ruby lasers work.
Quantum theory doesn't explain how the electron absorbs or emit photons.
Quantum theory doesn't explain how this energy conversion is lossless.
We don't experience 100% efficient energy conversion on our scale other than witnessing what the quantum scale does.
For us, one thing going in and two things coming out doesn't happen.
Oh, wait, isn't that the reproductive process?
But life forms consume energy in order to live, so they can't be the same.
That is unless electrons are consuming energy in the conversion, just from somewhere we can't observe.
In my condensing universe blog I explained that the universe doesn't have to expand in order for us to observe it expanding - it could be condensing and we would have no way to tell the difference.
But a condensing universe would have a surplus of energy stored in the fabric of space itself - maybe that's where electrons get that extra energy.
It gets me that two point-like objects can collide at all - Heisenbergs uncertainty principle would mandate infinite uncertainty as to their momentum.
The only conclusion I can think of is non-locality of influence - if they get close enough then that will do.
But at our scale non-locality doesn't happen, right?
Have you ever had some food cooking while you were on the phone and drinking coffee?
I've got news for you - you're non-local too.
We are entangled with this universe and with each other and our influence extends through time and space.
Life is an emergent property of the physics of this universe.
Speaking of time and space, at the very smallest of scales time loses its meaning, and I've got a feeling that at the very largest of scales, space loses its meaning, and our reality is some where in between.
I watched 3blue1brown's video on quaternions and wondered if the very big and the very small were the result of four dimensional spheres passing through our three-dimensional universe.
If so, electrons, photons, etc could be the same size as our universe but trapped on the surface of some higher-dimensional plane.
I think string theorists call this a brane.
Once you concede this, it follows that the Casimir effect could be other universes glancing off ours like electrons on a sheet of graphene.
Given that electrons are negative and protons are positive, why don't they collide and cancel their charge out?
I'm guessing that electrical charge and electricity itself is/are emergent properties as well, and something else is going on.
