The Fabric of Reality | Causal Sets
Thursday, August 20, 2015
To fully understand any specific object, idea or living-being within this universe we should strive for a fuller understanding of their environment. We can better accomplish this by achieving the ability to explain how space and time emerge from something more fundamental. Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and his colleagues argue that a radical reconceptualization of reality is the only way to explain what happens when the infinitely dense ‘singularity’ at the core of a black hole distorts the fabric of space-time beyond all recognition. What is the Fabric of Reality? Join us as we explore the idea of Causal Sets below.
Causal sets
Such frustrations have led some investigators to pursue a minimalist programme known as causal set theory. Pioneered by Rafael Sorkin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, the theory postulates that the building blocks of space-time are simple mathematical points that are connected by links, with each link pointing from past to future. Such a link is a bare-bones representation of causality, meaning that an earlier point can affect a later one, but not vice versa. The resulting network is like a growing tree that gradually builds up into space-time. “You can think of space emerging from points in a similar way to temperature emerging from atoms,” says Sorkin. “It doesn’t make sense to ask, ‘What’s the temperature of a single atom?’ You need a collection for the concept to have meaning.”
In the late 1980s, Sorkin used this framework to estimate9 the number of points that the observable Universe should contain, and reasoned that they should give rise to a small intrinsic energy that causes the Universe to accelerate its expansion. A few years later, the discovery of dark energy confirmed his guess. “People often think that quantum gravity cannot make testable predictions, but here’s a case where it did,” says Joe Henson, a quantum-gravity researcher at Imperial College London. “If the value of dark energy had been larger, or zero, causal set theory would have been ruled out.”
Could obtaining the ability to explain how space and time emerge from something more fundamental assist in the understanding of Bigfoot? Ron Morehead has been investigating the Bigfoot phenomena for over 4 decades and has come to believe the answers may lay in the further understanding of Quantum Physics.
SRC: www.nature.com/news/theoretical-physics-the-origins-of-space-and-time-1.13613