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I find it interesting that he mentions gravitons as a definite piece of particle physics, on the same order as photons, etc. I was under the impression that gr
by sq_ 7y ago
I find it interesting that he mentions gravitons as a definite piece of particle physics, on the same order as photons, etc.
I was under the impression that gravitons were simply one part of one possible conception of quantum gravity, and that we were definitely unsure about whether or not they exist.
- K0SM0S 7y agoSince this is coming from a physicist / mathematician, I immediately assumed it meant the placeholder for those — i.e. whatever conveys gravity, all of it must hold that many bits to describe the observable universe.
- ahuth 7y agoThe same thing stuck out to me, and definitely seemed presumptuous. However, I'm not a physicist, so what do I know? Maybe one way of looking at it is that despite the fact that gravitons are hypothetical, we can still do the math and calculate the amount of entropy or information that they would/could contain.
- auntienomen 7y agoGravitons are speculative in that they haven't been observed, but they're almost certainly the correct language for describing mild quantum corrections to general relativity. Simple scaling arguments show that _any_ theory of quantum gravity that reduces to general relativity at low energies passes through a regime where it can be described by gravitons. Whether gravitons are fundamental objects in quantum gravity is irrelevant for the kind of state counting Baez is talking about.
- sq_ 7y agoThanks for the explanation!