Jonathan Oppenheim likes the occasional flirt, but his interests are a little less intense than horse racing or one-armed thieves. oppenheim Likes to bet on the fundamental nature of reality, his latest concern is space-time itself.
Two great theories of physics are fundamentally opposed. In one corner is the theory of general relativity, which states that gravity is the result of the distortion of mass in space-time, assumed to be a kind of stretchy sheet. The other is quantum theory, which describes the world of elementary particles and posits that all matter and energy are small discrete chunks. Together they can explain much of reality. The only problem is that you can’t combine them. The grainy mathematics of quantum theory and the smooth description of space-time do not mesh.
Most physicists believe the solution is to “quantize” gravity, or show how space-time can be small quanta like the other three forces in nature. In effect, this means fine-tuning general relativity to fit the quantum type, and researchers have been working on this for almost a century already. Oppenheim, however, suspects that this assumption is wrong. That’s why he made a 5000:1 bet that space-time is ultimately not quantum.
new scientist We caught up with him to find out why he thinks the conventional wisdom could be wrong here, how experiments solve problems, and why physicists like good bets.
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