It's (sort of) discussing the work of Nima Arkani-Hamed and his Colleagues, and their attempt to reformulate quantum field theory so that it doesn't refer expli

It's (sort of) discussing the work of Nima Arkani-Hamed and his Colleagues, and their attempt to reformulate quantum field theory so that it doesn't refer explicitely to space-time, in analogy to how the principle of least action of Lagrangian mechanics doesn't refer explicitly to the causality/determinism of Newton's formulation (modulo some subtitles). Here's a bit more about their technical work. The motivation for doing this is as follows. When the principle of least action was discovered, it was philosophically very puzzling: why should this equivalent, non-causal formulation of newton exist? The reason of course turned out to be quantum mechanics! (it's a kind of stationary phase approximation to the path integral formulation of quantum theory, roughly speaking). Now in the early 21st century, there is a whole bunch of hints that space and possibly time are not truly fundamental quantities (in analogy to how newtonian causality was not fundamental). So how do you proceed? Method 1: make random guesses. Method 2: attempt to extend existing physics in non-random ways (e.g. string theory) Method 3: take a lesson from history Method 1 never works, method 2 is apparently too hard this time, so they are attempting method 3: if you need to get rid of space-time, don't MODIFY existing physics, but REFORMULATE it so that it doesn't depend explicitly on that concept, in analogy to how lagrangian mechanics reformulates newtownian mechanics to not depend explicitly on causality ( & quantum theory is then a simple deformation away). And if you can reformulate state of the art quantum field theories so they don't depend on space-time explicitly, perhaps a deeper theory will just be a simpler deformation away as well.