The road to unity
Published by admin July 21st, 2007 in UncategorizedIn Three Roads to Quantum Gravity Lee Smolin writes that
I agree with the basic idea. Let’s ignore the processes part and just read this statement as a denial of Newtonian atomic materialism:
The world is not made of things.
Things are conventions. Standard is the thing. The network is the thing. (Or for Smolin, the relationship is the thing.)
These are all correct. Then why do physicists blindly obey Newton’s authority and see the world as an absolute Newtonian atomic materialistic world?
In a world where things are standards there are no absolute building blocks of matter. Yet Newtonian Doctors of Physics keep observing absolute building blocks of matter.
It seems that Smolin wants to replace the Newtonian discontinuity (atomic materialism) with another kind of discontinuity (Quantum gravity). Why is that?
There is no discontinuity in nature. There is only density continuum.
6 Responses to “The road to unity”
- 1 Pingback on Jul 30th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
- 2 Pingback on Oct 26th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
- 3 Pingback on Feb 9th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
That quote by Smolin, “The universe is made of processes, not things”, I think is quite true. That’s one of the reason I use density operator formalism for quantum mechanics instead of the usual state vector formalism.
A state vector is frequently written like this: |a), where I’ve replaced the angle bracket with a parenthesis so that it doesn’t screw up the parser around here. The density operator formalism states look like |b)(a|, which means “the process that converts a state of type “a” into a state of type “b”. (Or, to avoid circular reasoning, the same thing expressed in density operator formalism.)
I read that chapter. I am not sure that he is using “process” as a technical term of quantum mechanics. Maybe he is using it as a concept which ties GR and QM and everything else.
I don’t know enough QM to tell the difference between your density operator and the usual state vector formalism.
Oh I know that Smolin isn’t using “process” as a technical term in QM. What I’m saying is that he should be.
The problem for Smolin and the rest, including the string theorists, is that combining QM with GR is so very difficult. They are unable to release their hold on what they know, so they have to find ways to glue together the incompatible things they’ve been taught. The result is that all their ideas are either immediately proven wrong by experiments, or are so difficult to compute with that they can never be verified (or proven wrong).
My feeling on this is that the methods used in such large amount in QM are good, and can be used to do gravity as well. What can’t be used are the theories that produced the methods.
I think we stumbled onto the correct mathematics, but have incorrect interpretations of it, and it is these incorrect interpretations that make combining gravity and QM in one theory appear so difficult.