Can Quantum Gravity Be Created in the Lab?
The Joy of Why
Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine
4.9 • 577 Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Quantum gravity is one of the biggest unresolved and challenging problems in physics, as it seeks to reconcile quantum mechanics, which governs the microscopic world, and general relativity, which describes the macroscopic world of gravity and space-time.
Efforts to understand quantum gravity have been focused almost entirely at the theoretical level, but Monika Schleier-Smith at Stanford University has been exploring a novel experimental approach — trying to create quantum gravity from scratch. Using laser-cooled clouds of atoms, she is testing the idea that gravity might be an emergent phenomenon arising from quantum entanglement.
In this episode of the Joy of Why podcast, Schleier-Smith discusses the thinking behind what she admits is a high-risk, high-reward approach, and how her experiments could provide important insights about entanglement and quantum mechanical systems even if the end goal of simulating quantum gravity is never achieved.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Steve Strogatz. |
| 0:06.4 | And I'm Janelle Levin. |
| 0:08.3 | And this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine exploring some of the biggest |
| 0:13.4 | unanswered questions in math and science today. |
| 0:16.0 | Here we are. |
| 0:17.6 | Hey, Jana. |
| 0:18.4 | Hey, Steve. |
| 0:19.4 | I've got something really fun queued up for you today. Good. I'm looking forward to hearing about it. Okay. Now, I think this should be kind of in your wheelhouse. It's about gravity. That's definitely within my wheelhouse. And now let me add one more word, quantum gravity. Yeah, and now it's in no one's wheelhouse. That's interesting, isn't it? |
| 0:38.1 | Because it's such a hard open problem in physics. |
| 0:41.5 | So I had the chance to speak to a great young physicist named Monica Schleyer-Smith. |
| 0:47.1 | She's at Stanford. |
| 0:48.5 | And she is taking an approach I've never heard of anywhere else, which is to try to build a kind of toy model |
| 0:56.1 | of quantum gravity in the laboratory. |
| 0:58.7 | Funny thing, right? |
| 0:59.7 | Yeah. |
| 1:00.7 | You think of quantum gravity as purely theoretical pencil and paper stuff. |
| 1:04.2 | Yeah, absolutely. |
| 1:05.2 | That seems maximally hard. |
| 1:07.2 | Maximally hard, right? |
| 1:08.2 | Do you ever hear this idea that gravity might emerge from entanglement? |
| 1:13.6 | Oh, yes. |
| 1:14.6 | It's one of my favorites, actually. |
... |
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