factual
Harmonic Oscillator Needs Closed Timelike Curves
Getting a perfect harmonic oscillator in these models requires closed timelike curves (the history of the universe repeating itself), which is a weird idealization; real physics probably has no perfect harmonic oscillators, illustrating that insisting on standard idealizations stresses the model just as deriving perfect rigid-body mechanics stresses molecular dynamics.
factualpending
Speaker
Stephen WolframEvidence Quote
“to get a perfect harmonic oscillator, it's very easy to have a perfect harmonic oscillator if you have closed timelike curves. In other words, if the history of the universe repeats itself, that's kind of how you get something like a harmonic oscillator”
Source
155 | Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics— Sean Carroll's MindscapeCreated: 6/13/2026, 3:30:55 AM
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