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发帖数: 7349 | 1 “All the world’s a stage…,” Shakespeare wrote, and physicists tend to
think that way, too.
Space seems like a backdrop to the action of forces and fields that inhabit
it but space itself is not made of anything—or is it? Lately scientists
have begun to question this conventional thinking and speculate that space—
and its extension according to general relativity, spacetime—is actually
composed of tiny chunks of information.
These chunks might interact to create spacetime and give rise to its
properties, such as the concept that curvature in spacetime causes gravity.
If so, the idea might not just explain spacetime but might help physicists
achieve a long-sought goal: a quantum theory of gravity that can merge
general relativity and quantum mechanics, the two grand theories of the
universe that tend not to get along.
Lately the excitement of this possibility has engrossed hundreds of
physicists who have been meeting every three months or so under the banner
of a project dubbed “It from Qubit.” |
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