Posted: Jan 25, 2018 6:41 pm
twistor59 wrote:crank wrote:
But,while you're shutting up and calculating, you're not extremely curious? I'm not knowledgeable enough to be passionate about any of the given choices, but still passionately curious about it all. I would bet most on 'none of the above', that whatever they figure out is going to be weirder than anything they're thinking, and simpler somehow.
Yes, I do have some curiosity: I imagine the final answer will involve something we don't know about yet. Something to do with spacetime and information maybe? I don't really know! I find trying to understand the parts of physics that are already well established to be challenging enough for the moment.
An essay at FQXi by Sean Carroll and Ashmeet Singh seems to make progress along the lines you suggest... I could be wrong as I haven't read it all yet but I keep hearing talk of 'emergent spaces' and/or 'emergent spacetimes' these days related to the entropy of the fields under study. All very interesting and leading towards matter transports? Who can tell? "Beam me sideways, Scotty!"
Essay Abstract
To the best of our current understanding, quantum mechanics is part of the most fundamental picture of the universe. It is natural to ask how pure and minimal this fundamental quantum description can be. The simplest quantum ontology is that of the Everett or Many-Worlds interpretation, based on a vector in Hilbert space and a Hamiltonian. Typically one also relies on some classical structure, such as space and local configuration variables within it, which then gets promoted to an algebra of preferred observables. We argue that even such an algebra is unnecessary, and the most basic description of the world is given by the spectrum of the Hamiltonian (a list of energy eigenvalues) and the components of some particular vector in Hilbert space. Everything else – including space and fields propagating on it – is emergent from these minimal elements.
FQXi source