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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

Non-majority opinion/Guestimate of reality follows:

I think that spacetime is an emergent phenomenon of something that has no dimensions. Imagine RAM in your computer, inherently there's an address dimension when the CPU needs to read/write data, but the actual physical location doesn't matter (other than latency).

How correlated two bits of matter/energy/spacetime are is a good proxy for distance, except when it isn't. A photon leaves a star, then strikes your eye a billion years later, and those events could be entangled, as far as the photon is concerned, they happened at the same instant in time.

However the laws of physics work, I don't see how there can be any direct mapping between what we see, and the underlying quantum phenomenon, as long as light and quantum superpositions / entanglement, are things.

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> A photon leaves a star, then strikes your eye a billion years later, and those events could be entangled, as far as the photon is concerned, they happened at the same instant in time.

If a photon does not experience time then I find it challenging to imagine that it could have a perspective at all.

It gets worse. Not only do photons not experience time, they don't experience space either. From a photon's point of view, it's always every "where" it needs to be. Which means there's no distinction between places. Which means space doesn't exist, from a photon's POV.

Reminds me of this quote "A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to"

I once read somewhere that if you swap time in spacetime with gravity, then the universe turns crystalline, and lots of stuff makes more sense.

In that way, perhaps photons experience other stuff.

"I think that spacetime is an emergent phenomenon of something that has no dimensions."

I actually think that's a helpful statement. If you read/watch Bernardo Kastrup or Don Hoffman, this is in line with how they present their primary argument about consciousness being fundamental.

Stephen wolfram is working on something like this, he wants to model the laws of physics entirely with recursive graph rewiring. I haven’t looked into it, but he says that space and time turn out to be emergent quantities when you look at it like that. He also has things to say about quantum and relativistic effects

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CLXyDCISsUY&themeRefresh=1

Stephen Wolfram is interviewed by Sean Carroll here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bMYtEKjHs0

They discuss the hypergraph model and Sean asks some good, pointed questions.

I think what you're describing is nonlocality? It's well-described by quantum mechanics, which sits on top of regular old continuous spacetime. Is that not the direct mapping you're talking about?

This kind of terminology soup speculation isn’t helpful. Don’t muddy the waters when you don’t know enough to add anything of value.

The article itself isn’t much better:

If space is made of entanglement, then the puzzle of quantum gravity seems much easier to solve: instead of trying to account for the warping of space in a quantum way, space itself emerges out of a fundamentally quantum phenomenon.

I have a PhD in a closely related field and I'm not sure what you mean--this sentence is well-formed and basically correct, if slightly simplified to appeal to laymen.

“If space is made of entanglement, then it emerges out of a fundamentally quantum phenomenon.”

This makes sense to you?

Its the part that you omitted from your summary that makes the statement nontrivial—the idea that the metric theory (poetically, the warping of space) is only valid as a low energy effective description, and the general case does not have a classical interpretation even in a limit.

To put it another way: the quantum theories that are best understood are the ones that are similar to a classical field theory, but that’s not the case here.

It appears that when I eliminated inessential verbiage, what remained was a tautology.

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