Quantum space (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, January 18, 2016, 14:55 (3013 days ago)

George Musser at great length on space. Is it real or a construct of our minds, with descriptions of string theory and quantum gravity all thrown in:-http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/lets-rethink-space-"The concept of space as a network goes back to the 1960s and the brainstorms of such innovative (and iconoclastic) theorists as John Wheeler, David Bohm, Roger Penrose, and David Finkelstein. Wheeler, for one, imagined taking a bucket of “dust” or “rings”—primitive grains of matter that do not exist within space, but simply exist—and stringing them together to form space. Physicists have been trying to make the idea work for decades. Today one of its strongest champions is Fotini Markopoulou, who pictures the stringing-together process as a graph akin to those Facebook diagrams. She and her colleagues call their approach “quantum graphity”—cutesy, but any effort to inject a sense of humor into physics jargon has got to be a good thing."-***-"It's astounding to think that space, thought for so long to be the rock-bottom foundation of physical reality, could perch atop an even deeper layer. Ironically, the main criticism I hear of quantum graphity, matrix models, and AdS/CFT isn't that they're too weird, but that they're not weird enough. All these models still work within the basic framework of quantum physics and general relativity, and much of the structure that is supposed to arise spontaneously is actually preprogrammed into the rules."-Comment: Once again programming is mentioned. Brings to mind Kastner's theories.