We tend to think of space-time as the underlying structure of the universe, but whether it’s truly fundamental, or whether it arises from something much deeper, is a question that keeps physicists up at night. “It’s not a philosophical question to debate over a beer,” physicists say. Marika Taylor “This is something that actually gets built into the calculations that people make,” say researchers from the University of Birmingham in the UK.
A great place to start is quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of elementary particles. One of the core tenets of this notoriously counterintuitive theory is that connections between particles can transcend our usual concepts of space and time. This happens through a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, in which particles can affect each other’s properties even when they’re half a universe apart.
Cosmologists now generally accept that quantum entanglement is intimately connected to the emergence of space. If we know the degree of quantum entanglement between two quantum particles, we can derive the distance between them. When we do this for a network of many particles, a geometry begins to form from which we can call space emerge. In other words, space may emerge from quantum entanglement.
Entanglement and space-time
Furthermore, advances in string theory, a candidate theory of everything, suggest that what happens in the universe can be explained entirely by data held at the exterior, or boundary, of that space — a phenomenon known as holographic duality. Combine this with quantum entanglement and you can build a universe that boasts a spatial fabric of distance and geometry.
Spiridon Michalakismathematical…
Source: www.newscientist.com
