Just figured out that unitarity and locality are linked to time and space, respectively. I've known for a while now that time is a purely mental thing which has no physical existence outside of the present moment. (This is empirically proven, for those new to the idea). As a consequence, I've been intuiting what it looks like if space completely collapses to a comparatively tiny now (in space that would be... "here"), but not making much progress. Then today I discovered a controversial theory in the mathematics of quantum physics which operates "without unitarity or locality." Searching these revealed that these are two mathematical measures related to time and space. Oh, I see. From what I can tell, unitarity is a mathematical way of talking about time. Locality, it's pretty easy to understand how it's related to space.
So, Aha! It is possible for there to be things that "exist" yet without reference to time or space. These things can be mathematically described, and this is one of the things quantum physics studies and apparently knows well, even though it's new to me.
But... how in the world am I going to wrap my head around the concept of no space? No time makes sense to me finally -- time is literally all an intricately-linked illusion in our minds -- but no space is... well... what holds everything together if it is not space? If space is merely a perception, how do we share space between us so seamlessly, as if we're all in the same (quantum mechanical) dream simultaneously? I can believe that time has been an unfurling of space through a seive of, uh, serial nows, but how do I do this with space? Oh this stuff breaks my brain, but I will keep on thinking about it any way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarity_(physics)
While I'm here, some related links that I went through while figuring this out, these are the better ones of the crowd:
- Woit: Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6260
- Unitarity Principle of Quantum Mechanics https://sureshemre.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/unitarity-principle-of-quantum-mechanics/
- Information Loss as a Foundational Principle for the Second Law of Thermodynamics https://www.researchgate.net/publication/1861558_Information_Loss_as_a_Foundational_Principle_for_the_Second_Law_ofThermodynamics
- Amplituhedron (For the Rest of Us) http://sciexplorer.blogspot.com/2015/08/amplituhedron-for-rest-of-us.html
- The Sacred, Spherical Cows of Physics Theoretical physics milks symmetry to power its newest tool. http://nautil.us/issue/13/symmetry/the-sacred-spherical-cows-of-physics