As far as we can figure it, basically, yeah. Wrapping your brain around the concept is less tricky than you’d think.

So gravity gets stronger the closer you are to a black hole, but at the event horizon things get weird. The extreme curvature of spacetime forces space itself to flow toward the singularity at its center faster than the speed of light, so on the inside there’s no “other” direction to point to, even photons emitted straight “out” can’t reach the event horizon and end up moving in the same direction as everything else. So space becomes timelike, proceeding inexorably from point A to B.

Time is more complicated, because it’s really hard to visualize. If you fall into a black hole, you’ll pass through all the outward-pointing light that’s been failing to escape since the event horizon formed, which puts all the past history of the black hole below you. Meanwhile, anything that falls into the black hole after you but before you hit the singularity can be seen falling from above as the downward-pointing photons catch up. The timeline of the inside of the black hole is laid out with the past and future being directions you can point to, making time spacelike.

Okay!

Entanglement is what we call any sort of quantum interaction that causes some property of two particles to become linked, like photon gun that always spits out two photons of the same polarization, or bouncing a couple of molecules together so that they spin in opposite directions. So long as nothing comes along to disrupt that state, we could measure one particle and we’d know the state of the other particle no matter where it is without having to measure it.

The “inexplicable connection” there is just information about a quantum pair, but it’s spooky because that information literally doesn’t exist until it is measured, at which point the connection is broken. A couple of intergalactic hydrogen atoms could exchange a photon across light years and become entangled for the rest of time, casually sharing some quantum secret as they coast to infinity.

Bonus answer, I think time is real but isn’t like what we imagine it to be.

I’m very interested, and anxiously awaiting my passport.

Never tried changing my name or gender marker but I’m still worried they’ll make up some excuse to deny me anyway.

Metaphysics has bigger questions to ponder and doesn’t apply to physics. It’s a branch of philosophy, not science.

And quantization was the solution to an even bigger problem in physics, the ultraviolet catastrophe.

We know that matter and energy are quantized because that’s the only reasonable explanation for why blackbody radiation is distributed like it is. The classical Raleigh-Jeans law, which accurately predicts thermal radiation frequency at low temperatures, fails to do so for higher temps. Only quantizing the emission of photons produces blackbody radiation predictions which match our experiments.

In short, we as a species have had a lot of practice designing governments in the centuries since the US constitution was written, and by their standard America is a dysfunctional backwater.

The checks and balances between the branches of our federal state were designed without political parties in mind, and they’ll need to be restructured to minimize interdepartmental collusion and prohibit self-dealing at least.

The executive should not be the sole issuer of pardons. The judiciary should be responsible for enforcing the penal system rather than the executive. The legislature should not be a competition between two sports teams. The Senate and electoral colleges shouldn’t exist. Representatives should be elected proportionally by state rather than winner-take-all for each congressional district. Recall votes should be implemented automatically if a representative trends down into negative favorability. The president must be subject to the law, and it should be easy for the citizenry to recall them as well. Judges should not be allowed to affiliate with political parties. Nobody in the government (federal or state) should be allowed to maintain ownership or control over commercial entities, and they should be audited frequently and randomly to ensure they have no conflicts of interest. The top marginal tax rate should be 100% and kick in as soon as an individual’s income exceeds some reasonable multiple of the minimum wage, which should itself be pegged to consumer price indexing of the cost to raise a family. Every elected position should have term limits. Etc etc etc.

This isn’t a scientific article. It only barely qualifies as a metaphysical argument, and that argument is false.

The distinction between quantum and classical physics is not merely one of resolution. If that were the case, then we’d have long since discarded classical physics as we developed the quantum variety.

The problem is gravity, a force so weak that we need an entire planet just to have a place to stand. Scientists are working on an experiment that can prove whether or not gravity is not a quantum field, and I’m quite confident they’ll discover that it is not. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-gravity-quantum-entity.html

The problem is that there’s no way to quantize gravity in a way that makes sense with our observations of how it works in macroacopic reality. Most attempts at a quantum description of the gravitational field as we understand it immediately blow up into incalculable infinities of gravitons and fail to explain gravitational time dilation at the same time.

I think the correct description of reality will require a perspective which hasn’t previously been described in mathematic form. I don’t think spacetime/gravity is quantized, I think that’s an emergent property of the same underlying process that gave rise to our quantized fields for matter and energy.

Heck, I love explaining quantum physics.

Ask me questions! I can dumb it down enough that even a child can understand!

As an enby that’s considering fleeing the USA, I’d note that it only discourages the most awful Americans. XD

The greatest revenge would be to simply take his money and ban him from working any jobs that pay more than minimum wage.

April Fools Day stopped being fun when Woot sold out to Amazon.

Rewriting the constitution is essential, or else the flaws in our government that permitted this state of affairs will not be addressed.

Rewriting the constitution is impossible, not only because of the polarized nature of our politics but because the existing system is designed to prevent amendments our rulers don’t want.

The government does not “give” power, it claims our power for its own and persists only because we allow it to.

I’ll say nothing more except to note that those who make peaceful revolution impossible also make violent revolution inevitable.

Because the system is designed to give people like us zero levers of control.

The only idealist here is the person sugesting that reform from within the system is possible.

It’s not the voters you need to resist, it’s the idea that a government can be valid when it purposefully acts against the best interests of those it is supposed to represent. Our implied consent of the governed is false and should not be respected.

The poor primary turnout isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s the inevitable result of an electoral system that is designed to prioritize money over people.

Merely improving turnout is not our goal, at best it is a means to an end. The actual end goal is the establishment of a government that represents the interests of all, but there’s no way to get there from here even with 100% turnout.

I’m not “throwing my hands up in disgust”, I’m offering a clear-eyed perspective on the challenges we face and the hardships that must be endured to achieve democracy.

If your organization isn’t treating the U.S. government as a threat actor then it can be safely ignored. If it is, then your opsec shouldn’t allow you to talk about it online.

Yeah, because America isn’t a democracy. It only pretends to be one.

There’s no fixing this without rewriting the constitution and there’s no way to do that when our politics are this dysfunctional.

Our government persists in its current form only because the American public is too cowardly to resist it. Those districts could disappear and reform overnight if enough of us stopped treating them as valid.

What country do you think we’re talking about?

Obama proved that turnout improves when politicians make specific promises about the things they’re going to fix and the only message folks got from the Harris campaign was that everything is fine and nothing needs fixing.

Nobody’s bitching about the term limits on presidents, we bitch about term limits in congress because it’s the only way to get the dinosaurs holding back progress to step down.

They are unreachable. This is the most heavily propagandized country on the planet and most don’t have the education to understand our political situation. Try and explain why corporate campaign financing is a bad idea and half of us start whinging about freedom of speech.

Maybe when the Democrats stop taking the corporate campaign dollars that align them financially with their Republican colleagues and kick out the blue MAGA assholes like Fetterman.

Roughly half of the population has absolutely no clue what’s going on. Kids, old people, non-news-readers/viewers, etc.

A third of the population is vaguely aware that some shit is going down based on vibes but can’t identify the problem.

Half the remaining sixth can identify the problem as political but misattribute the cause. Leaving just a 12th of the population actually aware of our situation.