Multiverse can't explain reality: The idea that is even stranger

[C C]

http://bigthink.com/videos/george-musser...s-stranger

EXCERPT: . . . The real message of the spooky action is that space and time are not fundamental. The particles are rooted in that deeper layer where space and time don’t yet exist. And that’s the way to explain them. So the building blocks of the world may not be tiny things. What could these building blocks be if they’re not tiny because that’s kind of what we think of as a building block; a Lego is smaller than the thing you build out of the Legos. They may be what seems to us enormous things. Things that span the entire universe and are somehow acting in concert with one another to product these phenomena of space....

[Magical Realist]

I was so intrigued by this tantalizing theory I had to search elsewhere for more elaboration. Here's one taken from a WSJ review of Musser's book:

"The general theory of relativity and black holes, Mr. Musser explains, offers up another candidate for this entanglement, now seen as a universal effect—not something only particle physicists have to worry about. After all, the general theory allows for the existence of so-called “wormholes,” tunnels through space and time that link different parts of spacetime—distant parts of universe, or (conceivably, although Mr. Musser does not elaborate on this) different universes. A wormhole is intrinsically nonlocal. Some theorists have even suggested that mini-wormholes might link entangled particles and explain their shared properties.

The island of knowledge that we are swimming toward, frantically trying to keep afloat, is the understanding that both space and time are illusions. Non-locality is the natural order of things, and space itself is manufactured out of non-local building blocks. “Locality,” says Mr. Musser, “becomes the puzzle,” but another puzzle is the precise nature of those building blocks. The analogy he uses to explain this involves water. Individually, the building blocks of water—molecules—are not wet, but collectively they produce the sensation of wetness. Individually, the building blocks of the universe, yet to be identified, are not spatial, but collectively they produce the sensation of space."===http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-loose-en...1447445341

This led me to explore another theory involving a subspace substrate of tensor networks structuring spacetime. It's part of this whole paradigm shift in physics now which no longer sees spacetime as fundamental but derivative of quantum information.

"Swingle is one of a growing number of physicists who see the value in adapting tensor networks to cosmology. Among other benefits, it could help resolve an ongoing debate about the nature of space-time itself. According to John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, many physicists have suspected a deep connection between quantum entanglement — the “spooky action at a distance” that so vexed Albert Einstein — and space-time geometry at the smallest scales since the physicist John Wheeler first described the latter as a bubbly, frothy foam six decades ago. “If you probe geometry at scales comparable to the Planck scale” — the shortest possible distance — “it looks less and less like space-time,” said Preskill. “It’s not really geometry anymore. It’s something else, an emergent thing [that arises] from something more fundamental.”

Physicists continue to wrestle with the knotty problem of what this more fundamental picture might be, but they strongly suspect that it is related to quantum information. “When we talk about information being encoded, [we mean that] we can split a system into parts, and there is some correlation among the parts so I can learn something about one part by observing another part,” said Preskill. This is the essence of entanglement.

It is common to speak of a “fabric” of space-time, a metaphor that evokes the concept of weaving individual threads together to form a smooth, continuous whole. That thread is fundamentally quantum. “Entanglement is the fabric of space-time,” said Swingle, who is now a researcher at Stanford University. “It’s the thread that binds the system together, that makes the collective properties different from the individual properties. But to really see the interesting collective behavior, you need to understand how that entanglement is distributed.”

Tensor networks provide a mathematical tool capable of doing just that. In this view, space-time arises out of a series of interlinked nodes in a complex network, with individual morsels of quantum information fitted together like Legos. Entanglement is the glue that holds the network together. If we want to understand space-time, we must first think geometrically about entanglement, since that is how information is encoded between the immense number of interacting nodes in the system...."===https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150428-...pace-time/

[elte]

I wonder, maybe a single water molecule actually is wet. Another thing that interests me is possible faster than light propagation of an effect.  A popular notion before the publicity of the search for gravity waves in recent years was that gravity waves instantly propagated through space.  It was thought that if the sun vanished, the earth would instantly fly off into space.  Now a particle called the graviton has been designated as the carrier of gravity between bodies.  According to Wikipedia, the graviton, as proposed, is massless.  Maybe having that quality is why gravity was believed to propagate faster than the speed of light.

[C C]

Musser isn't really expounding from an island, either. A variety of physicists back in the former decade predicted this trend; Julian Barbour "sort of" in 1999, too; and John Wheeler anticipated the role of pregeometry in physics way back to the 60s and 70s.

Brian Green: Today's scientists seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) are convinced that we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe this will involve a radically new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic "realm" that is itself devoid of time and space.

This is such a perplexing idea that grasping it poses a substantial challenge, even for leading researchers. Broadly speaking, scientists envision that there will be no mention of time and space in the basic equations of the sought-for framework. And yet — just as clear, liquid water emerges from particular combinations of an enormous number of H20 molecules — time and space as we know them would emerge from particular combinations of some more basic, though still unidentified, entities. Time and space themselves, though, would be rendered secondary, derivative features, that emerge only in suitable conditions (in the aftermath of the Big Bang, for example). As outrageous as it sounds, to many researchers, including me, such a departure of time and space from the ultimate laws of the universe seems inevitable. --The Time We Thought We Knew; New York Times, 2003

Carlo Rovelli: I think that the notions of space and time will turn out to be useful only within some approximation. [...] I am also convinced, but cannot prove, that there are no objects, but only relations. By this I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that refers only to interactions between systems and not to states or changes of individual systems. I am convinced that this way of thinking nature will end up to be the useful and natural one in physics. --World Question Center 2005 , Edge