The Tie That Binds: A Fundamental Unit of ‘Change’ in Space and Time

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ion or experimental measurement, the greater the radical ‘change’ of orientation of the event point’s axes and the harder it becomes to align the time axis of the point to the external passage of time and thus the externally determined space-time geometry. This situation creates a greater uncertainty in the ‘quantum measurement’ and, in fact, is the source of the so-called measurement problem in quantum theory. 5. Conclusion Debates regarding the deterministic and indeterministic nature of reality do nothing but obfuscate the true physical meaning of the quantum. In the end, all questions about determinism and indeterminism are irrelevant to physics. They unnecessarily widen the philosophical gap between the quantum and relativity. Newtonian physics and relativity theory have never been as deterministic as quantum theorists have claimed and the absolute indeterminism of quantum physics is nothing more than a popular myth. The true difference between the quantum and relativity is geometrical even though the difference is normally couched as a difference between the discrete and continuous natures of reality. Quantum theory is ideally point-geometric and relativity is physically an extension-based geometry. Both the quantum and relativity depend on the concept of a field (or fields), but the nature of the field differs from one model to the other. However, the single field that Einstein sought to discover in his theoretical research to develop a unified field theory was and still remains the best hope for the unification of the quantum and relativity. Within this geometrical structure of space-time, Planck’s constant is the binding constant of four-dimensional space to time and the quantum is reduced to the smallest possible (meaningful) measure of physical ‘change’ no matter how that ‘change’ is brought about.