Quantum Fluctuations Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 861):

But what are quantum fluctuations? It is a feature of Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations, as applied to field quantities, that, if one tries to measure the value of a quantum field in some very small region to great accuracy, this will lead to a very large uncertainty in other (canonically) related field quantities, and hence to a very rapidly changing expected value of the quantity being measured. Thus, the very act of ascertaining the precise value of some field quantity will result in that quantity fluctuating wildly. This quantity could be some component of the spacetime metric, so we see that any attempt at measuring the metric precisely will result in enormous changes in that metric. It was considerations such as these that led John Wheeler, in the 1950s, to argue that the nature of spacetime at the Planck scale of 10⁻¹³ cm would be a wildly fluctuating ‘foam’.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, this confuses instantiations of potential (field quantities) with spatiotemporal locations in which such instantiations occur. That is, it is the instantiations of field quantities that constitute a 'fluctuating foam', not the spacetime in which they are located.