Commenters debate the physics and draw philosophical parallels
2 Sep 20 11:49 AM · 3d ago · 1 post · 11 comments · 2 sources · development 2 of 2
HN commenters raised objections around positron scarcity, entropy, and CP violation, while others linked the idea to fiction like Andy Weir's 'The Egg' and Asimov's 'The Last Question' and proposed an analogous 'One-Observer Universe'.
“A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe... all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view.”
lioetersJohn Wheeler Theoretical physicist
Richard Feynman Theoretical physicistE. C. G. Stueckelberg Theoretical physicistYoichiro Nambu Theoretical physicist
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What people said 14 voices · best of 16 · verbatim
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Engage in the thought experiment that you are/were/will be every human for a sec. Is self-harm morally ok? Many would say yes. So "the egg" already gives those people a pass to hurt everyone else in this world because it's a form of self-harm. Great. Now for those who explicitly don't want to self-harm. "The egg" implies that your rebirths happen…
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One-Electron Universe L: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-elec tron_universe C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9776826 posted on 2026.09.20 at 11:28:05 (c=0, p=4)
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it's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idearight up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser)but I love how wikipedia…
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Even if there were as many positrons as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab…
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My thought is that if there's only one electron, then its probabilistic location at a place and a time, should be impacted by its own energy across all places and times. That quantum gravity comes from generalizing the Schrodinger's equation to include these energies in the phase of the wave function, causing the phase to skew and the probability…
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CP-violation would appear to rule this out.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violationThe main referenced wiki suggests that the missing positrons are inside protons, but recent a recent LHC experiment asserts CP-violation over baryons.
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A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe.It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
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That's such a great read.Asimov's 'The Last Question' is another good one that's in line:
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I always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?
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Gotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).
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I go against the grain and say that I dislike the egg. It is spiritually stupid and heretic and morally fake enlightened.
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How does this work with QFT? If an electron is just an excitation in a field then it being “one electron” is meaningless.
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How meaningful is this actually? Is this a measurable distinction, or a conceptual one with the same semantics?
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Isn't this proven incorrect by CP-violating processes that also violate T-symmetry (preserving CPT)?
All 2 developments of 1940 “One-Electron Universe” idea resurfaces as top Hacker… →
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