Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Ask HN: Quantum entanglement
1 point by V2hLe0ThslzRaV2 on Dec 31, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
Recently ran across physicist that claimed that physics is in a race to prove quantum entanglement based theories will unify physics and result in a completely new way to understanding physics.

Is anyone aware of any merit to these claims and able to provide notable sources to back why this might be the case.




It's hard to see what that claim exactly means.

There was very interesting and kind of deep interview with Edward Witten recently and he goes unusually philosophical https://www.quantamagazine.org/edward-witten-ponders-the-nat...

>What’s an example of something else we might need?

>Maybe a bulk description of the quantum properties of space-time itself, rather than a holographic boundary description. There hasn’t been much progress in a long time in getting a better bulk description. And I think that might be because the answer is of a different kind than anything we’re used to. That would be my guess.

Interview uses Wheeler's "It from bit" as background.

>I tend to assume that space-time and everything in it are in some sense emergent. By the way, you’ll certainly find that that’s what Wheeler expected in his essay. As you’ll read, he thought the continuum was wrong in both physics and math. He did not think one’s microscopic description of space-time should use a continuum of any kind — neither a continuum of space nor a continuum of time, nor even a continuum of real numbers. On the space and time, I’m sympathetic to that. On the real numbers, I’ve got to plead ignorance or agnosticism. It is something I wonder about, but I’ve tried to imagine what it could mean to not use the continuum of real numbers, and the one logician I tried discussing it with didn’t help me.


Believe this article was the best they were able to offer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040860


[100% Ph.D. in Math + 50% major in Physics here]

Short answer: Nah

Medium answer: (from the comment of nabla9) "It's hard to see what that claim exactly means."

Long answer: Superposition and entanglement are very common, almost all small physics system have some of them. But they are worth mentioning in strange cases, for example two entangled particles at long distance. (At a small distance it's so common that it must be used in many calculations but nobody cares about it.) So "It's hard to see what that claim exactly means." Do you have a link to the slides of the talk or something similar?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: