4 ms·

these folks are doing their best to combine and extrapolate mathematical principles to extremes (an approach which, nota bene, did prove spectacularly successfu

these folks are doing their best to combine and extrapolate mathematical principles to extremes (an approach which, nota bene, did prove spectacularly successful in explaining huge parts of the universe earlier on) but the results of this exercise has been exceedingly poor for almost half a century now. at some point we must give up or admit that the nature of the game has changed. In a sense even the tiniest piece of experimental evidence that probes (or at least remotely reflects) the actual inner workings of "quantum" spacetime would be worth more than this enormous cumulative effort to infer what is happening on the basis of abstract symmetries and what not.

awinter-py 4y ago
there were cool things that came from pure math in the early quantum + relativistic era -- lasers + black holes were math constructs before we thought to build them / look for them in the sky I think (as an outsider to this field) the 'probing' now has fallen to the quantum computing people. their day job is basically making houses of cards out of entangled particles; if there are tricks to be learned about entanglement, they may be the ones to find them
- ngcc_hk 4y ago
  And superposition. The other part like quantization of field and the wave function … decoherence.
zachf 4y ago
You might be excited by [0]. The idea there is to study a novel phenomenon in strongly-coupled quantum systems that is very complex to see ordinarily, but becomes easy to understand when you look at the same physics from the gravitational perspective. That would be a nontrivial experimental check of AdS/CFT duality. It's effectively a novel form of "quantum teleportation" wherein an excitation is transmitted between systems using the quantum equivalent of a gravitational wormhole [1]. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.06314 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.06314 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05687 https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05687

awinter-py 4y ago

there were cool things that came from pure math in the early quantum + relativistic era -- lasers + black holes were math constructs before we thought to build them / look for them in the sky I think (as an outsider to this field) the 'probing' now has fallen to the quantum computing people. their day job is basically making houses of cards out of entangled particles; if there are tricks to be learned about entanglement, they may be the ones to find them

ngcc_hk 4y ago
And superposition. The other part like quantization of field and the wave function … decoherence.

zachf 4y ago

You might be excited by [0]. The idea there is to study a novel phenomenon in strongly-coupled quantum systems that is very complex to see ordinarily, but becomes easy to understand when you look at the same physics from the gravitational perspective. That would be a nontrivial experimental check of AdS/CFT duality. It's effectively a novel form of "quantum teleportation" wherein an excitation is transmitted between systems using the quantum equivalent of a gravitational wormhole [1]. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.06314 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.06314 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05687 https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05687