Regarding Phase Space

Published June 5, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey guys,

Sorry for writing in late. My name is Jesse. I’ve been a huge fan of your guys from season 1 but I have never written to you guys. But since you have called out to a Physicist’s take on the episode, I decided to write in. This is going to be a very short email. I might write some other time with some of my theories.

First off, the train was making the noise as it was going into the tunnel because the tech guy was on that half of the train and not team Dolores.

OK, so Phase Space is a very important concept in Physics. It is just the graph of the momentum of a particle on the Y axis and its position on the X axis. But it is very important because it is a very easy way to describe the state of a quantum system. Particles cannot be represented as single points on the phase space but always as a spread out distribution because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. I was very curious to see why they have this as the episode title and was paying great attention to see if there was anything but I could not find any link to the actual physics behind phase space. Maybe it was a more colloquial usage.

You guys made a lot of comments regarding String Theory. String Theory is very complex but it does not have anything to do with the concept of Parallel Universes. Dimensions, yes. ST requires 9 spacial dimensions and 1 time dimension but this is not the same as the colloquial usage of the word dimensions. You cannot “exist in a different dimension” or so. That’s more of a fictional concept than a science fiction one. Sci fi is, like all great stories, fiction rooted in some truth.

Anyway, I don’t think phase space has anything to do with String Theory or multiple realities or dimensions or so. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Bernard went into some phase into the space of the cradle or so. Colloquial usage, as I said. Sadly, I don’t think it has anything to do with actual Physics concepts.

Thank you,
Jesse J

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