[b]Lee Smolin
The whole history of the world is then nothing but the story of huge numbers of these processes, whose relationships are continually evolving. We cannot understand the world we see around us as something static. We must see it as something created, , and under continual recreation, by an enormous number of processes acting together. The world we see around us is the collective result of all those processes. I hope this doesn’t seem too mystical. If I have written this book well then, by the end of it, you may see that the analogy between the history of the universe and the flow of information in a computer is the most rational, scientific analogy I could make. What is mystical is the picture of the world as existing in an eternal three-dimensional space, extending in all directions as far as the mind can imagine. The idea of space going on and on for ever has nothing to do with what we see. When we look out, we are looking back in time through the history of the universe, and after not too long we come to the big bang. Before that there may be nothing to see- or, at the very least, if there is something it will most likely look nothing like a world suspended in a static three-dimensional space. When we imagine we are seeing into an infinite three-dimensional space, we are falling for a fallacy in which we substitute what we actually see for an intellectual construct. This is not only a mystical vision, it is wrong.[/b]
Come on, even if you do understand and agree with all this, there’s still no getting around those “unknown unknowns”.
Of course, there really is no chicken and egg problem; certainly there were eggs long before there were chickens.
Next up: The tree falling in the forest.
The key question for a quantum theory of gravity is then the following: Can we extend to quantum theory the principle that space has no fixed geometry? That is, can we make quantum theory background-independent, at least with regard to the geometry of space?
[i]This has now been narrowed down to three answers:
1] yes
2] no
3] maybe[/i]
Many of the important principles in twentieth century physics are expressed as limitations on what we can know. Einstein’s principle of relativity (which was an extension of a principle of Galileo’s) says that we cannot do any experiment that would distinguish being at rest from moving at a constant velocity. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle to arbitrary accuracy. This new limitation tells us there is an absolute bound to the information available to us about what is contained on the other side of a horizon. It is known as Bekenstein’s bound, as it was discussed in papers Jacob Bekenstein wrote in the 1970s shortly after he discovered the entropy of black holes.
And that’s before we get to conflicting value judgments.
Some of its proponents like to say that string theory is a piece of twenty-first-century mathematics that has, by our good fortune, fallen into our hands in the twentieth century.
On the other hand, what will they be saying about it in the twenty-second century?
There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing.
Let’s imagine Don Trump’s reaction to this in defending The Wall.
