63 | Solo -- Finding Gravity Within Quantum Mechanics

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2019

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I suspect most loyal Mindscape listeners have been exposed to the fact that I’ve written a new book, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. As I release this episode on Monday 9 September 2019, the book will officially be released tomorrow, in print, e-book, and audio versions. To get in the mood, we’ve had several podcast episodes on quantum mechanics, but the “emergence of spacetime” aspect has been neglected. So today we have a solo podcast in which I explain a bit about the challenges of quantum gravity, how Many-Worlds provides the best framework for thinking about quantum gravity, and how entanglement could be the key to showing how a curved spacetime could emerge from a quantum wave function. All of this stuff is extremely speculative, but I’m excited about the central theme that we shouldn’t be trying to “quantize gravity,” but instead looking for gravity within quantum mechanics. The ideas here go pretty far, but hopefully they should be accessible to everyone.

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The end of this episode includes a bonus, a short snippet from the audio book, read by yours truly. Audio excerpted courtesy Penguin Random House Audio. And here are links to some of the technical papers mentioned in the podcast.

Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime
“Thermodynamics of Space-Time: The Einstein Equation of State” (Jacobson)
“Space from Hilbert Space: Recovering Geometry from Bulk Entanglement” (Cao, Carroll, and Michalakis)
“Bulk Entanglement Gravity without a Boundary: Towards Finding Einstein’s Equation in Hilbert Space” (Cao and Carroll)
“Mad-Dog Everettianism: Quantum Mechanics at Its Most Minimal” (Carroll and Singh)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast.
0:03.0	I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:05.0	And regular listeners will know that we've been doing a lot of quantum mechanics discussions
0:09.2	here at Minescape.
0:10.8	We talked at Great Length with David Albert about his skepticism about the many worlds interpretation.
0:17.0	I had a flipped podcast with Rob Reed where he asked me questions about the many worlds
0:22.0	interpretation.
0:23.0	We did a little bit on the history of quantum mechanics in the 20th century with Adam Becker.
0:28.0	And of course we mentioned quantum mechanics when we talked to people like Leonard Susskind
0:31.8	or Roger Penrose.
0:33.8	All of this has a purpose.
0:36.1	As you might know, I have a book coming out.
0:38.4	In fact, I'm releasing this podcast the day before the new book is due to be published.
0:43.6	It'll be called Something Deeply Hidden, Quantum Worlds in the Invergence of Space Time,
0:48.4	Arriving Wherever Books Arrived on September 10th, 2019.
0:52.9	And so I've been sort of getting people excited about quantum mechanics.
0:56.0	Quantum mechanics is an intrinsically awesome thing to talk about, but there is a hidden
0:59.8	agenda here that I'm not keeping very hidden.
1:02.3	So today's podcast, today's episode, is the capstone of that effort.
1:07.2	It's going to be a solo podcast, just me talking.
1:10.1	And I'm going to focus on this issue of how space time emerges from quantum mechanics.
1:16.7	So I've talked a lot about many worlds already and that's most of the focus of the book.
	...

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