Oct 5, 2024 08:37 PM
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/the-b...etime-meme
INTRO: Decades ago, I coined the phrase ironic science to describe theories that shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because they can’t be tested as genuine science can. Ironic science is more akin to philosophy or literature than real science. An ironic theory, like Freudian psychoanalysis, might be interesting, fun to argue over, but you can never say it’s true.
That brings me to “The Unraveling of Space-Time,” a special issue of Quanta Magazine. This bundle of articles explores the possibility that space and time, which Einstein fused into spacetime, emerge “from more primitive building blocks that don’t themselves inhabit space and time.”
For brevity, and levity, I’ll call this notion the beyond-spacetime meme. The meme isn’t exactly new, as Quanta acknowledges and as the invaluable physics watchdog Peter Woit points out on his blog “Not Even Wrong.” The beyond-spacetime meme is linked to physicists’ quest to find a unified theory describing all of nature’s forces.
A unified theory would reconcile general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, with quantum theory, which accounts for electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. General relativity and quantum theory are written in incompatible mathematical languages, which yield divergent views of space, time and causality.
For 40-some years, string theory has been touted as the most promising unified theory. Edward Witten, whom I once called the “Pied Piper” of strings, surely had something like the beyond-spacetime meme in mind in 1991 when he told me he was seeking the “core geometric principles” underpinning strings.
The problem, you guessed it, is that neither string theory nor other candidates for a unified theory make testable predictions. They traffic in mathematical thingamabobs supposedly inhabiting the Planck scale, which is zillions of times too tiny to be probed by real-world experiments... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: Decades ago, I coined the phrase ironic science to describe theories that shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because they can’t be tested as genuine science can. Ironic science is more akin to philosophy or literature than real science. An ironic theory, like Freudian psychoanalysis, might be interesting, fun to argue over, but you can never say it’s true.
That brings me to “The Unraveling of Space-Time,” a special issue of Quanta Magazine. This bundle of articles explores the possibility that space and time, which Einstein fused into spacetime, emerge “from more primitive building blocks that don’t themselves inhabit space and time.”
For brevity, and levity, I’ll call this notion the beyond-spacetime meme. The meme isn’t exactly new, as Quanta acknowledges and as the invaluable physics watchdog Peter Woit points out on his blog “Not Even Wrong.” The beyond-spacetime meme is linked to physicists’ quest to find a unified theory describing all of nature’s forces.
A unified theory would reconcile general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, with quantum theory, which accounts for electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. General relativity and quantum theory are written in incompatible mathematical languages, which yield divergent views of space, time and causality.
For 40-some years, string theory has been touted as the most promising unified theory. Edward Witten, whom I once called the “Pied Piper” of strings, surely had something like the beyond-spacetime meme in mind in 1991 when he told me he was seeking the “core geometric principles” underpinning strings.
The problem, you guessed it, is that neither string theory nor other candidates for a unified theory make testable predictions. They traffic in mathematical thingamabobs supposedly inhabiting the Planck scale, which is zillions of times too tiny to be probed by real-world experiments... (MORE - missing details)