Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
A few observations on Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. Unfortunately this post has been wating to be published for over a year and so I can’t expand on the quotes and be confident I’m reflecting accuratewhat the book says, but these blurbs are too good to pass up, so here they are with my current reflections:
On the many worlds hypothesis (Smolin doesn’t buy it, while I do): “one universe, seen by many observers, rather than many universes, seen by one mythical observer outside the universe.” I think it’s the conceptual framework that’s at issue here – ‘seeing’ is just a particular class of relationship between some processes in the universe, and so many observers implies a multiverse.
“Universe is made of processes, not things.” – I more or less take this as read, but I like to hear a theoretical physicist say it.
“The universe of events is a relational universe.” This one has been kicking me about for quite a bit; I find myself constantly layering phenomena by their causal prerequisites; combustion occurs when there is enough deoxygenated carbon and free oxygen, enzymatic activity occurs at a given temp & pressure, earth-like planets couldn’t form before the megastars/quasars made enough heavy atoms. Related to the notion of time as an emergent property of the distance of difference.