I hope you can help us make some sense of these really thorny and fascinating issues in, I’d say, at the frontiers of physics today. Really mind-boggling stuff, I enjoyed your book very much. Strogatz (02:56): It’s very exciting to me to be talking with the master of emergent space-time. Sean Carroll (02:54): Thanks very much for having me, Steve. Sean, thank you so much for joining us today. He’s the author of several books, including his most recent, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. But no matter where he is, Sean studies deep questions about quantum mechanics, gravity, time and cosmology. He’s also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. ![]() ![]() Sean spent years as a research professor of physics at Caltech, but he is now moving to Johns Hopkins as the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy. But what could that something be? Joining me now to discuss all this is Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist who hosts his own podcast, Mindscape. They’re starting to seem more like byproducts of something even deeper, something unfamiliar and quantum mechanical. (01:54) As physicists try to make sense of all of this, some of them are coming to the conclusion that space and time may not be as fundamental as we always imagined. Their smoothness breaks down completely, and that’s totally incompatible with the picture in Einstein’s theory. It’s almost like space and time fall apart. When physicists try to apply quantum theory to gravity, they find that space and time become almost unrecognizable. This amazingly powerful theory has been shown to account for all the forces of nature, except gravity. Down there, nature is governed by quantum mechanics. It doesn’t really have much to say about space and time at the very smallest scales.Īnd that’s where the trouble really starts. But Einstein’s theory is mainly concerned with the largest scales of nature, the scale of stars, galaxies and the whole universe. This warping of the space-time continuum is what we experience as gravity. ![]() Albert Einstein taught us that space and time could warp and bend like a piece of fabric. (00:53) But then, about 100 years ago, things started to get strange. And gravity is very well described by Isaac Newton’s classic theory, a theory that’s been around for over 300 years now. Up here, at the scale of everyday life, space and time seem perfectly smooth and continuous. Of course, none of us have any direct experience with space and time and gravity at this unbelievably small scale. Well, it turns out they get really weird when we look at them at their deepest levels, at a super subatomic scale, where the quantum nature of gravity starts to kick in and become crucial. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the mysteries of space and time, and gravity, too. Steven Strogatz (00:03): I’m Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quanta Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in science and math today.
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