Lee Smolin’s hunch
Smolin’s answer to the annual Edge question: what do you believe is true but can’t prove?
1. smolin believes that all quantum mechnics interpretations don;t make sense and that this implies a poss new theory.
2. the weirdness in the uncertainty that causes this is poss due to effects which are non-local (outside the frame) of the area being looked at.
3. there is no fixed background for anything, as general relativity suggests. just relative relationships. ” One consequence of this is that the geometry of space and time is also only an approximate, emergent description, applicable only on scales too large to see the fundamental degrees of freedom.”
4. “Hbar, the fundamental constant of quantum mechanics that measures the quantum uncertainty, is related to N, the number of degrees of freedom in the universe. A reasonable conjecture is that hbar is proportional to the inverse of the square root of N”
In answer to 3. this should extend to a relativistic theory of information - where information only exists between two systems (bit pairs). i.e. information is a measure of relative difference.
EdgeVideo: LEE SMOLIN
http://www.edge.org/video/dsl/EF01_smolin.html
“one piece of evidence that nature is discrete is the holographic principal”
instead of ‘real world out there (RWOT)’ theories - ones of info observed on a screen
beckenstein? bound. 4 bits of information per plank area of a screen that information is flowing through - e.g. a retina.
“perhaps geometry is actually dictated by information flow”. (paraphrased)
RSS
August 12th, 2011 at 9:42 pm
1. All information is two (2) dimensional.
2. Time is the third (3rd) dimension which causes emergence. We see three dimensions because of time.
3. The only particle without time travels at the speed of light. It is everywhere.
4. Time is beyond our comprehension now.