Everyone knows that human societies organize themselves. But it is also true that nature organizes itself, and that the principles by which it does this is what modern science, and especially modern physics, is all about. The purpose of my talk today is to explain this idea.
Can I hardly leave this post written below in my linked coment without some further explanantion?
Sean:
You have to be careful about words like “emergent,” because it has pre-existing connotations that may or may not be relevant to how the theory ends up actually working.
You know for me it became the quest to understand what the basis of reality was. So if one is given perspective to think about from different angles, then the very idea of a "emergent process unfolding from the quantum gravity regimes", then it would have been a truly ground breaking acknowledgement of what the basis of reality really is?
Plato:
I would have thought the modifications to GR might have signalled some truth to what was emergent(although this would ask us what that quantum geometry is?) from a condense matter perspective, as Witten saids below.
I also heard Robert Laughlin say, it didn’t matter if you use bricks or sargeant majors?
I had trouble with this ,and looking at CFT on the horizon, it made me think of string as a fifth dimensional component within the blackhole. Is this wrong and misleading, not to have looked at the spacetime fabric a a graviton constituent since these modifications were made to GR?
My thoughts were developing in perspectve as I did my own research, so all of a sudden the basis of the views that I was capturing started to make sense. What were people doing with the very ideaas of this theory of everything?
Witten:
One thing I can tell you, though, is that most string theorist’s suspect that spacetime is a emergent Phenomena in the language of condensed matter physics.
The Elephant?
Now having given the poem there for Sean's introduction to Mind and the poetry, we are given a sense of what the historical issues plaguing the ideas of quantum gravity? Filled with the perplex of citizens of a town? To have the proverb, this hinduist portrayal, Sufi expressed, as a lessson in our attempts to understand. It was not me, who first used John Saxes poem in the Physics realms, so do you know who this was?
So now we have this condense matter approach to consider? I wonder how well it will do when people share perspective about "this approach" to have taken a strong stance against Robert Laughlin's theory of everything? Where are you Peter Woit? What is your way, that you should be so different from what Lubos is saying below?
Lubos Motl:
All of us agree that some important features of physical phenomena do not depend on the details of underlying physics; many of these phenomena are emergent in character; it is not too important or useful to know quarks or strings in order to study most of the crucial concepts in biology, climate, physics of water, or quantum computing. If Laughlin thinks that other physicists do not realize this fact, then he is fighting a strawman. Most physicists realize these things - and many fundamental physicists actually use very similar mathematical techniques as Laughlin does in his "emergent" approach.
So is there a consensus on how the science of our day recogizes the work that is trying to make iself known, as the truth and the light of the way? What does the elephant represent?
Robert Laughlin:
Likewise, if the very fabric of the Universe is in a quantum-critical state, then the "stuff" that underlies reality is totally irrelevant-it could be anything, says Laughlin. Even if the string theorists show that strings can give rise to the matter and natural laws we know, they won't have proved that strings are the answer-merely one of the infinite number of possible answers. It could as well be pool balls or Lego bricks or drunk sergeant majors.
How far in depth shall our abstract views look, as one uses the math to gaze into the "blackhole of oblivion" and wonder? What constitues the very nature from that very horizon. How shall Robert Laughlin speak on it? How shall he speak about the trigger?